


إدمان || Addiction

by nigellecter



Series: Fire & Brimstone Arc [6]
Category: Charlie Countryman (2013), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst and Tragedy, Blood and Gore, Bottom Hannibal, Bottom Nigel, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Hannibal has Feelings, Incest, M/M, Psychological Trauma, Top Hannibal, Top Nigel, Twincest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 12:48:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 30,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7508866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigellecter/pseuds/nigellecter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone had an addiction and Nigel’s was particularly deadly as he continued his uphill battle as he teetered between good and evil. To him, more like accepting and fully merging into the light and sinking deeper into the ominous weight of darkness. His morals and ethics were already askewed since the tragedies struck from his early childhood. </p><p>Twins in Marrakesh, Morocco. Post-Fire & Brimstone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [YouDroppedYourForgiveness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouDroppedYourForgiveness/gifts).



Everyone had an addiction and Nigel’s was particularly deadly as he continued his uphill battle as he teetered between good and evil. To him, more like accepting and fully merging into the light and sinking deeper into the ominous weight of darkness. His morals and ethics were already askewed since the tragedies struck from his early childhood. 

 

His coping mechanisms differed from Hannibal’s; while his identical counterpart had been discreet enough, imploding the brimming anger to be contained within him, until the profound time came to be unleashed. On the other hand, Nigel constantly sought stimulant as virulent fury accompanied him ever so often, preferring to be recklessly adventurous and restless within the confines of their smaller habitat. 

 

Under their aliases, Hannibal was working at  al-Qarawiyyin university, mosque and library during the day and continued to indulge in lavish parties, not too different from the ones he had been holding at their Baltimore mansion. At night, he would occasionally track down the rude in sounders of few, stretching a span of few days in a succession. Operating not too different from his Rolodex method, but the only stark difference had been that he always had kept a pad in a smooth leather along with his small leather bound sketchbook with monotone, intricate patterns with names and addresses. 

 

That particular endeavor became where  _ Cyril  _ and  _ Mayne Hezaispoir _ , Hannibal’s and Nigel’s assumed aliases since they set their feet upon the foreign land, which summed up their philosophy and the presence upon the world. A  _ master  _ and a  _ lord _ , which exerted the  _ power  _ upon those less deserving. At home was the only occupying space where they shed the unfamiliarity of pseudonyms along with the every facet and nuance they exuded through their changed aura. 

 

“They have to be put down. I’ll take care of his wife at later time, you can give her the sedative while I dispatch my colleague,” Hannibal watches the beveled edge of the syringe pierce through the lid of the drug as the clear liquid surges into the inner tube. Nigel undrapes his holster from his chest, loosening the leather as the comfortable weight of the firearm eases off from his side. 

 

The twilight chill, which would pass off soon enough and be cocooned by a weighty feel of damp humidness, not at all unbearable as the dryness would soon overwhelm, had been fairly mild even now through the open window. 

 

“And your fucking coworker?” Nigel questions further as he hypothesized the projected course of the night’s unfolding with his quirked up brows, a brimming curiosity consuming him as his restless fingers graze upon the hammer, but the corner of Hannibal’s lips ominously curl up in an enigmatic manner. Oh, did he have such a  _ grandiose  _ plan to catch two birds with one stone. 

 

_ Perhaps even more.  _

~~

 

There would be no image as intense and enticing as this one, as the recollections reel in front of him like a tape. So yes, they had invited the couple, instead of hunting for the rude at night, they had their debauchery upon cracked ribs, spilled viscera and upon each throbbing heartbeat, more spillage of blood spectacle, redder than the rusty chroma of the traditionally built clay walls and sinister than the bleeding mauves under the moonlight. It was another one of their parties, although, this had been only a formal party of four; Hannibal’s colleague from the university along with his wife. Firmin and Annette Moreau, a middle-aged, a quintessential example of sophisticated French couple manifested upon expensive Chanels, silks and linen, the husband had been Hannibal’s superior, whereas the man’s sophistry and ostentatious display of mockery and superiority.

 

At the party about two hours in with their course and pleasantries, while serving the dessert, Hannibal lunges the ice pick from the chilled bucket, connecting precisely against the temple. The movement so decisive and fast that it became a blur of movement. His efforts had inspired him to show both compassion and respect towards another scholar, yet, sadly, the other individual didn’t deserve his genuine conviviality and courtesy. 

 

This image has been just like Hannibal had dreamed it a few nights ago, as that image unfolded in front of him as if choreographed. In the midst of pretending to serve himself a glass of Punch Romaine, Nigel looks up in complete apathy, reflecting his twin’s placid indifferent facade as his head cocks towards the wife of the man, who is too stuttered and flabbergasted to emit any kind of sound. As if she had been petrified with color-draining face along with widened eyes, then, Nigel produces a hidden syringe beneath his cuffed sleeve and shoots the concoction through the exposed crook of her elbow. 

 

Hannibal returns to his set task as if nothing had happened and Nigel is reminded of the booming electronic music of his club in New York and Bucharest as the surge of arousal and adrenaline becomes something akin to the combination of the carnality that had just taken place and will imminently follow. The manifested image of blood, threatening to rush and spill forth in a luscious cascade of waterfall and the pure sensuality of the dark blood gradually seeping into the intricate gold and silver time of the plateware ingrains to be something monstrous, yet, the concocted image presented upon him had a stillness and solidity, which balanced the arousing nature of the situation. 

 

Feeling his erection stir, Nigel pulls himself off from the comfort of the chair and retracts the handle of the ice pick, watching the man’s torso collapse onto the empty plates, the image etching into his mind as the causality linking those two things became so vividly clear. So obvious as to be somehow beyond comprehension. 

 

Seemingly lost in a daydream, mulling over as the orchestration of Hannibal’s monstrous, yet sublime intent becomes a reality, Nigel ignores Hannibal’s teasing remark. “Technically, you killed him.” The slouched figure, with the gleaming light already faded from those snake-like eyes staring into the unfathomable abyss which he would never wake up, his wife will join the similar fate as her impeccable, un-creased white Chanel blouse taints with all things unassociated. 

 

Hannibal pretends to shave more of the ice with the blood-coated pick, as he watches the shaved ice turn into a froth. Briefly watching his reflection of himself against the gleaming, mirror-like blood, he combs his memory of a similar occasion where they had gotten off and fulfilled their voracious arousal in the basement in their Baltimore mansion. 

 

Like a long-suppressed yell threatening to burst out from deep inside them, their bodies lurch concurrently, crashing into one another as the sheer force takes breaths out from them. Urged further with all the emotions rolling inside them, through coalescing saliva and mingled arousal and flesh, with each sharp intake of breath, the blood assails their nostrils and the image laid before them and another image soon to be created upon them in a reality became suddenly threatening. However, there would be no ignoring it as the sexual desire flooded over them through successive breaths caught in their lungs become a product of mental re-enactment of their previous experiences. 


	2. Chapter 2

Greedily scanning each other’s features as garments scatter across in arching strokes resembling entrails, their impassive features spread more with radiant glow within each other’s embrace. They don’t have to grow desperate to search and fathom for an answer they know so well. The lengthening silence, except their breathless pants and the inseparable connection they form as their ravenous lips search for more contact, the scene seem to still in freeze-frame, before everything hurtle to fast forward in threefold. 

 

It’s like taking over the threshold of their physical tangibility, the steeling hunger presented in malleable, abused lips urgently pressing the right buttons to let the senses detonate. They’re not inexperienced adolescent boys who are openly exploring the uncharted territories. The barracks had been claimed, the terrains had been won and lost numerous times just like their fornications. Onslaughts of provocation washes over through the bristled skin as a cool whip of breeze scintillates, claiming the very core of them. 

 

Hannibal recalls the forlorn melancholy he felt at the habitat by the eroding bluff. Even when a seraphic calm washed over him, the sensation had been as ephemeral as the telltale sign of his rigidity, his corporeality achingly seeking flesh-to-flesh contact. He had felt like going through the narrow road alone, no, it wasn’t frightening nor wrenching to walk through that desolate path. It was feeling as if he had been flanked by mountainous walls on all sides, suffocating him like it had in the orphanage. Behind his mask of composure, he descended into a shrieking silence, an unfathomable one at that. As distant and reticent Nigel had gotten over with a blitzkrieg of an assault that would bring an indefinite barrier upon them, Hannibal cannot help but to feel a resounding sense of responsibility, which resembled both paternal and fraternal affection.   

 

But he perceives that to be the last thing Nigel wants. Through reclamation and ravage, the obsidian corners of non-recollectable memories would vanish in its eternity. Through the anarchic recollections, Hannibal would wipe Nigel’s memory in an immaculately clean state.   

 

Lips clash together once again in such force that the collision takes their breaths away, caress of their hardened, sun-kissed skin grows tenacious and relentless as they conduct the same, synchronized orchestration of their muscles and dimples. Both capable of uttering sweet nothings as well as to wreck havoc upon their victims as serpentine sinisterness of a predator lingers, widening as the deep-socketed eyes deepen in their hue, feeding off the diminishing energy as limbs flop backward. Rigidity soon melts away in leniency as Hannibal’s eagerness paints a stroke over Nigel’s jawline, breathing and thrumming with life.  

 

An eclipse, the light and dark coalescing together to cause a world of difference upon the world as to let their presences known, if they hadn’t done it already. Their intense, penetrating gaze matches such an occasion, but with a generated spark stronger than the bloodlust. Clockwork fastens within Hannibal’s manhood, as the need to expand his energy onto his subject, the utmost attention required of him. 

 

It was the feeling that stimulated something deep in their very cores, licking thoroughly through their spine like a continuous electric shock as they complete the full circuit. The overwhelming inexpressibility beats them like a series of surging waves breaking on the jagged rocks as they move as one. Through rough handling and scattered remnants becoming more like a aftermath of a crime they both had committed, a thrilling energy seems to flow out and collect on every pore of their body as more sweet, pungent tang paints over their bodies. Cascaded through the mat of Hannibal’s chest hair, trailing down all the way to meet their erections as their body begins to seep with their preexisting intense hues. 

 

Through such uncanny serenity as their bodies mingle like entwined braids, no amount of unspeakable viciousness of their digested act. Where they simply desired to shed the fake facade which they exemplarily displayed in the general public. With that lingering act of fakery, along with separate lives they led, all gone, they were unable to deny the image of each other’s nakedness - not only the tangible reality of their flesh and breaths, but their psyche as well. It was eternally stamped indelibly within their brains, burned into them like a scalding brand. 

 

Nigel is completely enraptured and enveloped by the warm radiance of that particular image, aggravated by Hannibal’s heated flesh and still-warm caress of the crimson. Such image which seemed to be forbidden only a few months ago when he had been wrongfully assaulted. The violence exerted through incapacitated and helpless state transforms into such an exquisite bloodbath as Hannibal had crossed the boundary which never had been a palimpsest  into the account of what Hannibal had told him in the aftermath. 

 

All the latent energy sparking with each grinding motions and through the penetration, all force and without hesitation as the sensation becomes almost unbearable as the new intensity streams forth through Hannibal’s straddling movement. With ease of the constricting fiber of his muscles, Nigel accepts the battle-cry of his body. Through the hardships, the triumphant feeling would be greater, in multitudes. As if Hannibal’s skin had been turning him, Nigel pushes Hannibal’s shoulders through digging nails and a hard squeeze, a drop of sweat temporarily blinding him. His own erection, entrapped without any give between their sandwiched planes of flat muscles, the velvety flap continues to egg on a production of sticky fluids, as he washes away the lingering unsettling feeling through his quiet smile. 

 

His voice hoarse with desire, Nigel licks a drop of paint which smear onto the curve under his lower lip. Pivoting his body like a leverage, Hannibal repositions himself to deepen the penetration, jabbing turning to impaling as the kindled fire fully bursts into a wanton incandescence. He could feel the dimple along his back arch slightly as Hannibal maneuvers him. Through constantly panting sound exchanged through with as almost sour, bitter sweetness akin to animal musk sweeps through the length of their bodies with each inhale, they become wild animals, interspersed with inaudible press of moans, turning into eerie shrieks, threatening to push through the taut neck which arch. 

 

As Hannibal relentlessly penetrates through the tight coils and easily through the resistance, Nigel seems to plunge right over the edge of consciousness he experienced a few months ago, but something entirely different. Seemingly sinking into Hannibal’s heat and his own flesh, desire spawning in the form of arched back and curled toes. 

 

Hannibal wants to swallow his brother, let them melt into each other as their presence and simulacrum blend. His original composition without any care of the world as they lock within the perimeter of each other. It’s like entering through a pitch-black tunnel, without knowing where it would end as each footsteps echo. Only aware of the ebb and flow of their breaths, entwined fingers as hardened and veined skin brushes and ringing footsteps, along with the atmosphere seeping with dampness. The ever-growing yearn to take a soaring flight escalates as the pin-shaped exit widens to a size of a golf ball, then they’re soon enraptured, completely consumed by the dazzling illumination.   

 

Through draped dark locks as the center of Hannibal’s maroon eyes spark brighter than the brightest star looming over them, he drowns in Nigel’s throbbing blood flow, impelling with force as paroxysm claims ahold of his entire corporeality. Half-glazed, a hint of bloodshot orbs shoot up with ajar lips, as Nigel hears an ever-growing drowning cacophony of chirping cicadas course through him. The simultaneous culmination only has them to plummet down, as Hannibal’s hard muscles overdrive into a frenzy, a climax to their overture.


	3. Chapter 3

An exquisite heat rushes over, relentlessly whisking from both ends, serving as a propellant fuel within the physiological buildup of their capable physicality. It edges, both painfully and delectably, taking gradual steps before Nigel is faced with the zenith of all. Their bodies embody more like a kiln, slow to reach its boiling point, then the heat feels like a widening hole swallowing them whole and each minute movement of their rippling embers elevated to deafening roar of the plane taking off as Hannibal finally releases. Confoundedly charging as he rams in a converging collision. They’re never loud, their breaths and slapping flesh does enough of the sound making so they don’t need any unnecessary addendum. 

 

Squeezing his eyes shut as Nigel remains dazed, the newly spawned heat boiling up inside him, egging on his own release. Contracting muscles echoes over and over to take hold of every strand of his nerves. As the whooshing vertigo soon transpires into a cloud nine, Hannibal feels the body underneath him lock in a fossilized rigidity. 

 

The orchestration ingrained inside his head like a note of sheet music, to their perfecting masterpiece - repeatedly playable by heart, yet every outcome would vary with many variables. Through deeply sketched brows and creases the corner of Nigel’s dilated whiskey pupils, a crackling ember rekindles in multitude, leaving a scalding, charring trail upon his own abdomen as audible catch of breaths.  _ Sure _ and  _ steady _ , never appearing to wear thin as every pore bristles and quivers with incorrigible desire. 

 

Like a drowning swimmer desperately trying to abate the acute cramp beneath the swallowing water, Nigel’s frenetic breathes push to let out a strained lump, before his clenched teeth and lips ajar in a loud grunt, more like a territorial growl of a tiger. Impaling his length deep into the inescapable hold of Nigel’s walls, Hannibal continues to rut and entrap the slouching length, as the last hot trail dribbles down the folded length. The long couch, accommodating two Grecian mess beginning to wind down along with the beating cascade of downpour, 

 

The afterglow manifests in an undulation upon the strands of incinerated muscles. Hannibal’s orbs continue to brim with traces of embers as sculpted biceps anchor him in place, between his twin’s mat of glistening chest hair and frantic trembling akin to a reverberating trampolin. Nigel sinks like a heavy mass of rock and Hannibal collapses onto the quivering expanse of muscles and the sinking swamp, malleable cushions leaving a few craters where his body had been plummeting down to how Hannibal perceives the scent of home to be. The steely swirl of snow and crisp drifts, along with the fragrance of pine cones and hearty, substantial and earthy scent of soil when their mama cooked the potato-based dumpling soup. The fragmented, ruined map inside his heart mending it in itself.  

 

Now that amalgamation of scents overwhelm in the midst of the dry, windless late summer night, the bustling exoticness had settled deep underneath the rim of misty clouds, aglow with moonbeam. His own body more like a caressing surge of foamy wave, an eternal, unbreakable bond of high and low tides, all through the rough patches. All chafed and bruised skin as the stunning array of hues seep through the skin like watercolor. 

 

Hannibal still applies salve, bandages, whatever his reckless doppelganger comes home, still intact in one piece, along with a scalding tint of the blood and lingering perturbation towards whoever seem to have butted against him. It rather alarms Hannibal, as the night unfolds ominously through the thickening thunderclouds. Growing grateful of his off-day the day after, Hannibal thinks of spending his time preparing for the presentation he’s going to give on  _ Islamic influence in Medieval Europe _ , especially Byzantine art and its distinguished metalworks, mosaics and sculpture. Then a dinner party which would surely end in a feast of smug satisfaction, reveling in spectacular extravaganza of crimson and brittle bones.  

 

Surely, Hannibal knows that Nigel will be  _ bruised _ ,  _ battered _ , basked in unprotestable heatwave of all, but never be  _ broken _ . The tenacious hold he has upon the physicality is greater than any other threats he had ever faced. 

 

In contrast, Nigel accepts his older twin as a cornerstone, an individual with the tenacious resistance of steel. Though the society would accept Hannibal as a indescribably demon-like, a fallen angel defying to be defined. His goodness, stability, how just placid Hannibal always are enthralls him. The way he just gets on with things effortlessly and making it look so easy. He hadn’t ever mentioned this in epiphany to his brother, but their long span of scarring and healing, the faded sketches brand the strands of memory. Even those excruciatingly painful recollections had a power to manifest itself and transpire to become something effervescent. Serving as a sprout to formulate newly blossoming euphoria. 

 

Through _ billet-doux _ , etched words pressed upon the tip of his tongue, Hannibal paints the curve of Nigel’s neck with more firm strokes, crimson spectacle through the defined contour of the carotid and collarbones. Appreciating the comforting serene silence, their breaths and body the only instruments they pluck and toot over the gentle throb of veins and muscles. The pin-up girl gets her transformative makeover, dressed in opal black, glimmering in crescents under Nigel’s sweat and blood. 

 

Swimming in the cascade of slightly chilled summer air, Hannibal plants a kiss over the drumming vein before parting, their adhered bodies undulating in synchronization. There’s an uncharacteristic urgency rubbing off through his demeanor, as if he didn’t want to leave his twin alone. Of course, Nigel’s more than capable of protecting his own interests and safety, yet, the looming portent continues to pull the strings tight. It could be a sudden spawned paternity or fraternity Hannibal felt throughout the years of their turbulent relationship. No matter what, he feels a staggering amount of responsibility even in this private and intimate moment. 

 

Nigel only emits an exhaustive sigh, sheets fluttering beneath him as the ridges and folds from the rippling creases deepen along with his weight sinking further. Languidly tilting his head as fingers sleepwalk through the fluttering planes of his abdomen, Nigel looks upward with an unreadable expression. Hannibal likes to wash up, he would rather wear the scent proudly. Time had been like a wave, its unpredictability along with his own rashness carried his life downstream, yet, here they were, putting a consistent strain to keep them from breaking apart. Every single time, they would conquer and stand triumphant. 

 

The clinging moisture accompanies his quick retreat as Hannibal feels the first raindrop contour around his prominent cheekbone, as he pads back to the rooftop. A towel draped over his lean waist, his slightly damp hair gracefully veiling around his forehead with a slight bounce. He’s still slightly lightheaded, the world blurring in dizzying ripples of white-hot as his body slowly descends and basks upon the lingering heat akin to a bed of coal. 

 

Through the cascading patter of the water coming from the overhead shower, Hannibal stands over as he is faced with his twin’s body, collapsed in a careless entanglement of appendages and unkempt mane of an animal veiling the side of his damp contour as the sinking shadow takes ahold of him. Nigel is as still as he had left him when Hannibal returns to their couch. As he lowers the drapes as the streaks of rain gradually lashes against the tarp and hears the rhythmic concert of Nigel’s steady and slow heartbeat and the quenching spell of shower washing away the dryness, he is immediately taken back to his adolescence. Vividly visualizing the denouement of a poignant and tragic novel,  _ The Sorrows of Young Werther _ . 

 

_ Would his brother met an abrupt death if he hadn’t interfered on the unintended journey of tense coils and teeth? _ He’d rather drink the blood of his own heart than facing the despaired grief, albeit imitation, once again. 

 

Through Hannibal’s placid impassive expression, a benevolent sympathy oozes out through a slow blink before he sinks himself yet again into the spreading heat of their embrace. All of a sudden, like a hook never letting go of its chance of capturing the biggest fish in the pond, the back of Nigel’s foot rounds the back of Hannibal’s thigh. At the same time, his talon-like fingers yank away the towel, the motion itself swifter than the predator’s onslaught upon its prey as merciless claws dig into the soft flesh. Hannibal still maintains his stoicism while others might have showed even a slightest hint of surprise, but then, Hannibal isn’t like the others. He merely welcomes it with an amused tilt of lips. 

 

“That must be your fucking record time,” Nigel’s voice drips with a faint hint of virulency before his usual husky voice sinks with a bit of strain. “Who the fuck takes a fifteen-minute shower? Surely you haven’t _come_ _again_ in the shower.” A spark of bewilderment tugs the corner of his lips as Nigel watches the whipping towel rendering his twin once again in a primitive state. 

 

Hannibal raises a quizzical eyebrow, looking even more paler underneath the overhanging lamps. Looming tall against Nigel’s face, which had retreated back against his shadow, Hannibal’s thin lips set in a grim straightened line before an imperceptible curl softens up his feature. Pressing his back against Nigel’s front, he feels Nigel’s sharp jaw imprint a mark upon his shoulder. He still smells of sweet and sour tang, like sticky molasses. 

 

“I would rather prefer it hands-on,” Hannibal could feel Nigel’s hot breath against the crook of his neck and a possessive arm hooking him from behind. “We have a lot to do tomorrow, surely you haven’t forgotten the tailor’s appointment.” 

 

Fingers combing through thatch of Hannibal’s chest hair as he yanks, Nigel ignores Hannibal’s irritated, passing glare. “I’ll be fucking damned if I forget,” with a long exhale as he nuzzles into Hannibal’s back hair, a guttural hum rattles his chest. “Perhaps in the morning.” 


	4. Chapter 4

Through sharp maroon mirroring the laser honing into a fine point, Hannibal’s gaze fixates upon the trails of pink pooling around the empty pool’s edge. The recently deceased Firmin Moreau’s blank, empty light silvery blue gaze, his face as seraphic as it ever could be with his slacken eyes and drooping facial features and still tinged with warmth, as if only his astral body had ephemerally left. The vessel simply waiting for it to slip back as to walk away from the waterfall of cold blood seeping into desolate gray cement floor takes over his visual stimuli. 

 

Hannibal imperceptibly grins, feeling Nigel’s steady exhale tickle his upper vertebrae as his steady and strong heartbeat matches that of a slow adagio. A sonorous melody he could always plunge in, as the world revolves and reduces to their rooftop. Four people, he’s only the conscious one to mull over the seraphic serenity of the sinking darkness. The Moroccan night had a tendency to grow either more effervescent through night markets during the peak times or sink further down into an unperturbed peace when everything sunk in the sweeping caress of the obsidian black. 

 

Idly stroking over his twin’s veined hand over his abdomen as Hannibal ponders his options. The euphony of unfolded night becomes a symphony to his ears, the right selection of instruments, not one greedily overpowering another as he lets himself indulge upon the pleasant effect. With the deserted location of their villa, perched atop, looming over the others like how their lives had been led. No matter the means, he would be always the one with the triumphant etched smirk stamped upon the sinister curve of his lips. 

 

_ The inevitable tangible reality of their shared dominance.  The exerted control over the strands of their inferior lives as he sought closure upon their damned existence. _

 

As the downpour passes through with a bang. A thunderous shriek after, as the booming sparks sketch through the vastness as he quietly retreats, transfixed to the stacking stimulation coming from all his side. Hannibal closes his eyes, after taking a brief moment to give a deserved attention upon Annette Moreau. 

 

Looking at her slumped figure, carelessly thrown in a limp heap on the ground as her small lithe frame had slid off the chair reminds him of the feeling of heart-sinking, of his chest expanding until it inflates beyond his capability. Swallowed by unchecked fury, no breathing lives had escaped his merciless massacre of that rundown bar where Nigel laid similarly against the dampened ground. Through his absent and doleful gaze, he watches the annihilative force which he had wrought; torn, unrecognizable battered spectacle along with charred, mangled mess. He had walked upon the entrance of hell, where the chasm in his heart continually created a sundering breach in time.

 

She’s about to be turned into a scrumptious meal along with her husband, upon the dinner feast tomorrow, yet those who stood passerby, careless as the treacherous night had lingered and unfolded into another day didn’t deserve to be made a part of his permanent self. He already had all the procured ingredients, most of them from his extensive garden, some of the local spices from the establishment he had made acquaintance along with his prime necessities.

 

All the professors, some of the exemplary students will get the honor of consuming their acquaintances and mentors, savoring the fall-off-the-bone tenderness of the meat, unknowing the origin of the meat as they gloat and entertain over the expectant reaction. The dug-up fire pit in the backyard by the garden would nicely roast them with all the herbal flavors, as the low heat would seep through every porous surface of the tough sinews and tendons. It would leave them enough time to prepare the rest, along with their errands over the other side of the town. 

 

The tailor Hannibal was able to befriend had been the closest thing he could find that matched the quality of the Baltimore one he had frequented. Finding his and Nigel’s wardrobe finding the nice balance, the three-piece suit and European slum days were long over for both of them. They dressed more alike, in lighter tones as they welcomed another, more breathable season approaching. Nigel’s well-worn calfskin holster resided snugly, wrapping around the hard planes of his body underneath his blazer. Hannibal looked a bit more buff, because of his extensive workout and consciously healthy eating habits. Nigel’s revolver, with the initial ‘N’ etched in his typical scrawl cursive and the rest of his full name fading with years of use, along with his backup glock rests upon the adjacent armchair within Hannibal’s arm’s reach, along with careless bundle of discarded clothes, topped off with an upside-down Sperry boat shoes. 

 

Hannibal likes to maintain his life down to minutes. If he had a journal, he would definitely be the one to keep a bullet journal, yet, he doesn’t see the necessity as he simply doesn’t require one. No need to migrate the tasks, as his lists would be ticked off and crossed out almost daily without any skipping beat. With the ingrained habit pre-programmed into his labyrinthine path of brainstems, his meticulous planning unfolds like a pre-installed software. 

 

Feeling Nigel’s breath hot against the crook of his neck, Hannibal slowly maneuvers himself free of the loose hold. His twin’s clasping arm, unclinging yet a full manifestation of the other’s dualism; there was a resounding fond attachment within the harsh, scathing words his brother uttered in antipathy and annoyance. Although they both are well aware of their own inadequacy because of that, there’s no escaping it. It has an inescapable shackle around their limbs and as if they are looking through the invisible bars of their respective subconsciousness. People believed in twin empathy and talked about how effortless it would be to let two starkly different individuals sharing the same substantial coherence and stability over time. Alternatively, they had simply accepted their resurgence, their heart catching the alight fire and as it turns back to ashes, they have come through the world, reborn a resilient creature.

 

Plucking himself out from the peaceful solitude upon the gradually dissipating drops and Nigel’s wound arm, Hannibal moves like an autopilot. His brain already having calculated the projection of the movement as he wastes none. The woman would have to be preserved, frozen in pieces except her whole thigh. Same goes with the man - Firmin’s heart and lungs would make a nice meal, as he knew the man had maintained his physique rather well and didn’t smoke. Definitely not as fit and toned as the Lecters, but still, the centerpiece would be the right balance between fat and muscle, as those yield the most scrumptious and succulent meat, along with no trace of bitterness within the meat would be nonexistent. 

 

The scraps are soon to be incinerated, the meat and organs trimmed, the leftovers discarded, everything returns as if nothing sinister had taken place, even the air feels more fresher as the rain had washed off all the lingering suffocating dryness along with its distinctive scent of rusty tang, more overwhelming and potent than the rotting flesh and desiccated skin, stretched taut over the skeletal features. A few hours easily pass, wrapped around his task as Hannibal completely delves into his favorite task, with an apron around his robed frame, he puts the covered dish, ready to be put into the oven just before they leave for the tailor. With their projected arrival just about two hours before the party, everything will be set and ready once again. 

 

Returning back to his place, reserved for him only, Hannibal discards the robe, folds it neatly and puts it away before sinking into Nigel’s embrace once again. His twin barely stirs, and Hannibal’s backside pushes against Nigel’s hard front. Encased within the shadows as the sun starts to peep through the distant horizon, it doesn’t reach the safe sanctuary of twins yet as they slumber away through sonorous steadiness of their beating hearts.  

 

Soon, Nigel’s typical husky slur with an undistinguished intonation between each syllable rings against his eardrums. Not unlike the position they take now, but reversed. Fingers splayed open, Nigel’s veined tanned flesh caresses through the dampness of Hannibal’s chest, through the hard planes, down to steady expandation of each stretching muscle. 

  
_ You’re delicious and addictive. I don’t know how I ever lived without your lush prose and wicked ways. _


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mostly in Hannibal's dream POV.

Hannibal doesn’t have to lower his gaze to be perceptive of Nigel’s rakish smirk dripping forth as they had mulled over the words Nigel had spoken with such eloquence in one of their pillow talks. That very night, Hannibal had dreamed of the time when everything didn’t fall into the proper place like it had been now; when they were still pulling a vehement tug-of-war between the _wicked_ _lust_ and _desire_ towards each other and toying with each other’s _possessive_ (and _jealous_ ) nature. They were lone beast and god among the world, the brawl and brain upon the unredeemable and none could dare to cross their reserved boundaries.

 

Complete trust came with a steep price and Hannibal had offered what he considered to be an _ultimatum_ to his twin. _Be the one who fully accepted who I am, along the untamed demons and what’s left of his ravaged yet humanized heart._ He had his own reasons and all he needed was a _confirmation_ , like a sealed brand upon their flesh and blood, a totally reciprocated feeling, he wasn’t about to delve into an unrequited love and yet another unforeseeable amount of waiting through spilled open ribcages and bonfire going up within his heart. He requires a permanent anchor, he knew his twin did, too, in the midst of meaningless sea of faces. _Unimpressive_ , _impermanent_ along profound _indelibility_ . A fragility among the profound dominance, prolific drive serving as deeply rooted _morale_ among their skewed morality.

 

Long after the spillage of sunset had receded back behind the obsidian blackness and when Hannibal watched his own blood exude in splatters through steely maroon, as his view slightly doubled over as the world blurred in an abstruse filter, he had scented the permeating force of Nigel’s usual aroma. He didn’t admit it to his brother, but it held a strangely calming effect. The swelled silence in the room is like a huge hot air balloon expanding for a takeoff, the swishing voice dwindling and fading into the distance. Though Hannibal himself never preferred his twin’s chosen brands when it came to hard liquor, the choices which his reckless lifestyle brought and his devil-may-care attitude which had earned him a significant scars throughout the years.

 

The terror he had endured, holding the imaginary funeral of his brother. _Was he really gone and dead?_ He knew of Nigel’s penchant for violence, as it had been threaded with their shared trauma as it expands and breaks all the bones within their souls, the porous skeleton with permanent holes inside. The simultaneously contrasting sensation, their frenetic sultry hearts battling against the frostbiting limbs, benumbed as their view drench with red. He still recalls that very day, when Nigel had stepped within his sanctuary with gaudy tracksuits, just like he had remembered him from tender age, still malleable against the world stretched in front of them.

 

Hannibal had felt smaller than he ever had before. Not when he had been embracing the soil which continuously seeped his own crimson, certainly not when he had been incapacitated for periods at time whenever the recurrent nightmare turned merciless, ravaging through his cells to shriek in onslaught of incinerating heat. Just like after when he admitted he couldn’t return to his home alone, just like when he watched Nigel’s assaulted body collapsed in a heap, in the midst of clenched teeth and sluggish muscles. There’s a queer tranquility as Hannibal continues to dream while awake. It’s not his usual daydream he could pluck out of without ever losing his grounded identity, along with the discernible reality.

 

The twins always had been fond of that hue, yet, it becomes an endless array of pins and needles upon Hannibal’s skin as the idea of disintegration overwhelms him. He hadn’t been to his ‘home’ country, and with a good reason at that. The dawning sun feels like a flickering light upon the obsidian darkness, the gradual sunbeam along with the untarnished purity of the world after a downpour does nothing to blanket Hannibal with yearning warmth. Almost entirely filled with void as he lets one word linger against his still warm lips.

 

He hadn’t seen her strewn remains, the gnawed greedy marks with not even a thin strip of flesh marring the malleable bones. The decomposition deterred by the whirling mass of relentless snowdrift. He could still reminiscence the arctic chill lick through the every vestibule of the manor, which traverses through his grown limbs at more rapid speed. It trapped the twins until they were found huddled in the corner, the last remaining wood offering the lingering crackle fire to warm their bones, seeping chill of desperation and eternal damnation.

 

No lives would be the same after such a diversion through their lives and it had never been the same. Baltimore reminded him starkly of that. To Nigel, Bucharest did, too. The bleak gray walls, the buildings on the brink of demolition getting a new slapdash of modernized facade, which stuck out like it didn’t belong there.

 

Through sultry blaze sweeping between the negative spaces of their bodies through his steady exhale, he watches Nigel’s relentlessness get the best of him when Dr. Sutcliffe had met his unexpected demise. It would’ve have felt like a comet from the unfathomable universe sending him a destined ticking bomb straight into his heart, where no means of prevention existed.

 

Hannibal could feel the slight tremor, the typical brand of Nigel’s exuding heatwave transform the ambiance into something of a hellfire - as if his soul had been plucked out of his expired body, its sinister entity transferred to the very smooth trigger which would surely send a calamitous effect. That very moment when the tangible spikes of protection becomes brittle against the frenetic lean muscle, a potent symbol of life aggravating the sheer apathy and distance of manifested fury like a dark confession. The sharply honed hazel, potent enough to pierce through the back of the skull as the bullet tore through the brain.

 

Through the rotting putrid flesh, there’s lingering strand of his brother’s emotion present through fluids. Like the droplets running down over his jaw, along the line of his throat towards the lean muscle thrumming beneath. A sign of Nigel’s upheaval of humanity, as eyelids tremor in the face as if coming across a harsh smack of blinding light as minute spasm traverse down the muscle of his cheeks.  

 

 _We’re ruinous together_. Nigel doesn’t have to prod his brother for all the details as it unfolds like a brightened cosmos, the images as stark and vivid like the milky way presented upon him in strands of memories, unfolding like a reeled film. He could place himself behind the unrelenting gaze exuding with calamitous fury which never holds him back when it comes to clearing the bar. Coupled with the resounding contemptness and sure and steady steely gaze, both beautiful and terrifying at the same time. The confined lean muscle beats too close to the proximity of the vessel which locks in and his own silence had given Nigel an opportunity to break his heart with actions, though unintended.

 

It was an unleashing of his breakdown, that last slip of his adamant human veil even Nigel couldn’t strip away like a diving suit. Through such exhibition of different degrees of horror, lashed out in the form of each strand of emotion metamorphosing into gaping raw flesh. Seemingly instant, the individual crimson droplets meld and blur into thick streaks, pouring down with ferocious speed as they splatter, the bartender’s throat gashed open in the artery splutters intermittently - it wouldn’t have been instantaneous and that particularly prime pig would have felt every single excruciation until he exsanguinated, until every last fucking drop had been tracing the lifeless stretch of limp appendages.

 

Hannibal had already planned the deviousness, the scheme to make the best of his former love interest. He reminiscences the time when Nigel had shown up in the office with a beaming smile, quickly tightening into a thinned grim line as the etched curved lines rapidly disappear behind the brooding, straightened face. There’s a pendulum of urgency present behind Nigel’s widened hazel, and Hannibal sees himself, uncompromised yet still as if he was still sitting on the desk chair, hemming and hawing through his options.

 

There would be no intervention when it comes to this particularly unsavory human being. Hannibal’s linguistic skills were uncontended; he already could fluently speak several different languages, some of which he hadn’t spoken in years. As he had been forced to learn Arabic as an academic and scholarly language, he had made an effort, his most formidable one at that, to befriend an older storekeeper, who owned a renowned precious antique books. High off his love for an intricate beauty of the artistic craft. Where tornado meets a volcano, within a few months of drowning within this exotic language which are spoken in wide arc, his distinguished skill put a step ahead of any other French scholars he grew fond of, including an alumna working at another university not too far from where they reside.    

 

Precisely six a.m., his eyes open even without an alarm clock. Far away in the horizon where a sliver of Mediterranean sea greets him, a widening strip of orange glow grows even more starker as his eyes snap open. “Get up, sleeping beauty,” a slight mischief oozing from his curled lips, Hannibal’s fingers lightly smack against the thick stubble his twin wears from the night before.

 

A snort slipping out from his yawning mouth, Nigel looks more like a male lion waking up from his short nap after a satisfying meal than anything else. Shifting his hips as entangled sheets free from his unclothed frame, Nigel pads through the rooftop beneath the handmade Islamic tent, lusciously flowing and still dripping rainwater, with his eyes fixated on the screen of his burner cell.

 

“We have to make the trip quick. I finally have the fucking lead.”


	6. Chapter 6

Hannibal pushes a stubborn lock, which had been cupping his forehead and creating a half-veil around his intense maroon back. As he picks up the soiled sheets and takes a whiff of the pungent scent of their copulation along with the previous night’s downpour, a genuine surprise crosses his still features. A curious tilt of his head, then his pale eyebrow quirks up in peaked curiosity. Deep maroon dilating as a spark of something other than inquisitiveness crosses the filmy pupils.

 

Like a stilling cobra coiled up in an unperturbed silence that had been irritated, Hannibal shoots a look before taking a decisive approach with dead gaze. The flooding sunlight makes his arching brows more prominent above his deep-set penetrating orbs. The patch of it lingering upon his exposed sun-kissed chest, through the mat of his chest hair.

 

“You haven’t informed me of any new cases you managed to pick up while you have been venturing the city. Apparently you have been _ busy as a bee _ .”

 

The last set of words drawl with his characteristic Eastern European accent and Nigel looks over his shoulder, etching that last line, the address where the most recent evidence had surfaced by his heart;  _ 12 Rue Azbezt _ .

 

He immediately recalls the address being not even a fifteen-minute walking distance from the previous building where they had found the same severed head along with the preserved body, tucked away from the immediate view. It had been hidden beneath the trap door leading into another room, full of unsanctioned artifacts and forged duplicates of them for black market sale.   

 

Before disappearing into the corner of the narrow corridor, the whirling ‘what if’s’ and ‘what could have been’s’ accumulated within Nigel’s mind before he looks up at Hannibal. Putting on a layer of fortified armor of _ Mayne Hezaispoir,  _ Nigel’s fingers blur as he texts back his partner.  _ “Found another fucking skewered head? I’ll be there ASAP.“ _

 

With a glint deepening the shades of green flecks within his bottomless hazel, it’s not hard to visualize the gruesome view of dribbling meat of the brain, the stale rusty blood streaking in multitudes of layers, caked over the preexisting ones, deepening the hue as it glazes over beneath his feet. The ear-splitting screams as coiled throat bleeds in gushing streams, the severed head still retaining the lift it had been previously occupying.

 

A mantra of bumptious, derisive, vulgarity of the media; bodily fluids with pulsing breaths and chipped fragments of teeth full of bloody, awful mess. Until the exposed jagged flesh with gnarled ends decompose and rot first, where the splitting motion have shed deluge of crimson, along with benumbed brain discharging its last flaring spark. The twisted muscles would remember everything, but the gleaming silver remembers nothing as it keeps on feeding off the innocents.

 

Those particular strands of atrocious recollections had been permanently etched, unchanged, within his brain cells. Nigel had relived through it all in his recurrent, painfully ardent and clear nightmares. Where his hand dipped into the warm cavity of the splayed-open ribcages, the hypocritical nature of both resounding horrific putrid stink, as well as something bewitching about that colossal streak of blood, bursting and gushing on the earth with the rippling motion.

 

It’s not the sheer brutal coldness that makes him to despise this particular crime, that chill of yearning and longing makes his body to tremor. Hannibal would be surely familiar with what his somatic cells are feeling right now. That flaring kindle sweeping through him like the heatwave from the earth.  _ Would Mischa have her soul by the time he had consumed her? How long does it linger before it parts its former vessel? _ Perhaps her spirit still lived upon his own and fueling that very desire. As if he had been predestined to carry it forth after the idea of survivalism took over his unshaped morality.

 

“Apparently, I’m even more of a vigilante than I thought. Can’t fucking let the innocent ones perish.”

 

With his typical lazy swagger of the hips, Nigel stretches his back like a languid cat about to climb up the tree to take a nap and disappears beneath a cascade of water overhead as fog immediately clouds up the suite bathroom. Although Hannibal only stayed clear off from killing children, Nigel’s excluded list included women and non-criminals on top of them.

 

All he had brought to justice, whether it had been his personal vendetta or out of sheer contempt and hate, those whom he had killed were lowlife scumbags who abandoned their family to sink into a bottomless pit of gamble, a womanizer, an abductor, drug traffickers not so unlike who he was in his previous life were the prime candidates, the red flag upon his new line of work.  _ Was he searching for a redemption or was this out of his sheer curiosity and intrigue? _

 

Most memories altered, transformed, even taken a completely new form as the brain shaped it around like a malleable clay. Through life-changing traumas and other curve-balls thrown at him at such a young age, there were things he still found extremely difficult and be lenient. Trust and loyalty came at a steep price, yet once it rolled in his own way, there was no deterring it.

 

Yet, his partner,  _ Jasper Lefevre _ , and he immediately bonded since their initial meeting at one of the lounge bars Nigel had frequented. The other man thought the name  _ Mayne  _ was a unique one and he hadn’t known anyone with the particular name, so did Nigel. There were many variations of Johns and Jeans he met through his businesses, but never Jasper. He had a sheer opposite features, still boyish after aging like a fine wine, although Nigel could see the distinctive fine lines and drooping skin beneath his jaw giving off his age. Close to his, perhaps a few years older.

 

It stuck there within his subconsciousness like a vehement thing and it would take years and years to shatter it down to movable pieces. The admission was surprisingly easy and he never talked about this blasphemy, a taboo turned one of those things he accepted with both vulgarity and ultimatum. Jasper had shared his own, the horrific pileup of collisions which left him as the sole survivor among his parents and three other siblings. At least Nigel had Hannibal. Nigel could see the fine lines etch through the corner of his partner’s eyes.

 

When his own life had taken a gradual, steady descent and he gauged there would be no nadir upon his wretched life, Nigel butted heads with Darko and had gone through his withdrawal like a determined fighter. Through this abnegation, he found himself within the resulting abrasion. He felt himself gradually disintegrating. Growing more slovenly and mind beginning to wander. Soon, acedia took a tight grip of both his corporeality and mentality. He had nothing to lose and had climbed his way through hard work, determination and persistence. Now he was at the pinnacle of everything, after what it could have been the most unfathomable sinkhole he’d ever dive headfirst right into it. They had diverted the FBI, as no other suspicious gazes trailed them. It seemed condign after all the things the twins had been through.  

 

However, there was one pertinacious thread he couldn’t sever even after he had given his most valiant effort. Through the rough, uncouth exterior full of virulent venom, there lied an empty  _ carapace _ , where the supremacy held accountable for his brewing  _ humanity _ . Where the wobbling edge muddied like the blending boundary of dense puddle of blood and dead night when even moonlight hadn’t dared to make its appearance.

 

Muscles throughout his body constricting, as if he had been shot with an incapacitating drug within his system, his body feels numb all over, fossilized within the encasing pelt. His eyelids snapped shut, he preserves the last remnant of his body heat by drawing both his arms and legs towards his chest. Feeling like a soul contained within an immobile vessel like a coma patient, all thoughts point to one pivotal thing he hadn’t conjured up a courage to ask himself. Over and over again.  _ What if he also had died along with his brother? Would he have become what Hannibal had became, as nothing happened but I happened? _


	7. Chapter 7

There’s only one  _ exception _ , where he allows his vulnerability and regret of  _ Nigel Lecter _ to seep through, it’s the beautiful, calamitous nature of crimson spectacle, effervescently blooming like a faint permeating ink, drawing a petal-like shape as it expands its colloquial poetry of descant colors without his tainted hand coming into the play. The relatively fresh blood flaring brighter under the overhead noon light. 

 

The demolition upon the unforgiving flares of the firestorm spreads faster than the projected bullet aimed for his victim’s head. The exsanguination itself would never sever the fueling rage Nigel still feels beneath his encased rumbling heart. With bared teeth and jagged infrastructure of the building still standing tall like skyscrapers upon the invisible bars of his threshold. Like exposed slatted ribs, gnawed and brittled.

 

Within his askewed morality and with the ones who had it coming, the whole fountain of spillage seemed to stretch out into eternity.  _ Contempt _ transpiring and transmuting into  _ reverence _ . Enthusiasm concealing into the flaring heatwave upon his extended arms as his farouche decisiveness had brought upon them a shriek of stardusts - atoms disintegrating as the electrifying sparks discharge. Laden with significance, along with the intensifying scent of the charred skin of the forehead, Nigel would feel a fine tremor become a resurgence to something else in entirety -  _ a hedonistic copulatory exploration within the carnal destruction. _ His legs trembling, just a little with a mere thought of it. 

 

The devotion of dualism. As if his own head had been dipping as his own perineum spreads even wider against Hannibal’s exquisite tongue. All the inflamed muscles melting away under the talented ministration as he exerts that control Hannibal was so used to demonstrating - driving him as Nigel fuels on his duplicity of submission. An issue of trust that seemed to be perditious to their sensitive relationship was never going to be abrogated - they were alone without each other and through seeing each other burn and char along their wicked devil holding them in the strain of confliction.  

 

He was used to the grandeurness of the tangible corporeality; a continuous and eternal exploration of Hannibal’s body, and vice versa through the strong, serpentine curve of their back, fieldwork of muscles, intricate indentations of hardened, sun-kissed skin, all bone and muscle and sinew beneath the intoxicating and irresistible package. The solid frame capable of reaching both  _ carnal destruction  _ and  _ exquisite destination _ , their itinerary shared by measured depth of their breathing and free of any inconsequential narratives. 

 

And the recollections of memories pasted onto the pensive of his mind like pastiche of photomontage, as he surrenders into another carnal vision of severed heads, the spilled blood contained within the empty void of their petrified pupils, stripped naked upon the ravaged entanglement of furnitures and intricate inlays and patterns etched upon their skin like a brand. 

 

The rhythm had been established, between their carnal debauchery upon their irresistible heat and vortex of the sequential unification. High on ecstasy, teetering between the splitting images of specters resembling them in decalcomanie, quivering forms and unbearable ache as a gravelly, guttural cry pushes out of their throats almost concurrently. Both petrified in muted fascination as they continue to plunge and pluck themselves back as flush blooms skin to blood petals. Drowning further into the onslaught of sensory and pleasure overload as their erogenous zone gets an added dose of stimulation with them on the verge of hyperventilation. 

 

Nigel cannot fathom falling into those imageries without omitting one from the other. Through the commotions and turmoils of quotidian life, his own memory turns into the most reliable ledger, full of his observations blossoming like Hannibal’s own lavish, ostentatious herb garden taking over the adjacent wall from the kitchen. 

 

_ Was he fucking dreaming? Fading beneath the pensive of his niche, where Hannibal had hovered around with a rusted key in his hand?  _

 

Feeling one of his imperceptible, minor wound transmorph into a festering gash full of puss and fluid, he pieces together the fragmented pieces, continuously being severed by his own demons within his mind. A  _ small _ ,  _ involuntary _ gasp pushes through his cottony throat as the musky dank scent fills up his noxious brain. 

 

It had the same effect as it did when he was within the time frame of an imminent release - his vertebrae spiralling with unimaginable heat, beyond his command as the lightheadedness washes over him with a rusty, putrefying odor of drying blood. It only took a minute span of time until the lust devalued itself into loathsomeness. 

 

~~

 

Only few days ago, at the very location Nigel had recalled before, he had come across the festering sight of dried out cadaver which had evaded the scrutinization of the law enforcement, or better, he figures the useless police hadn’t gotten into turning the ravaged place through every nook and cranny enough to find another body, hidden beneath the trapdoor which had been jammed shut. He could hear the rattling wooden latch scatter chipped fragments of the terra-cotta walls, hollow just beneath the heel of his feet. 

 

After ramming the metal end of the tent rod inside the rusted metal hook and literally chopping it down as limbs become its own gleaming fury, he could feel the familiar tingle flare through the slightly curved spine. The torpor of the unforgiving and unbearable heat seeping into every pore as Nigel wipes a dripping beads of sweat as he starts down the creaky stairs. The stale dank reminiscent of his long-forgotten flat in Bucharest. Suspended in shadows, where nothing had any meaning and when he occupied that very space, he had no meaning to be nonexistent. The house stripped bare, utilitarian, out of fealty. 

 

It had been one of those unforgivingly sultry days, even in the midst of passing season as summer readies to tag along with the fast approaching autumn. His tight linen shirt already plastered to every expanse of his broad muscular and limbs, the gravelly ground coughs up more dust, suspended in air like a noxious fume. A loud sneeze rattles his chest, as he watches what it used to be a spice rack, completely demolished upon characteristic slashes of machete and a violent crash, which had ignited a sweeping fire, blazing up rapidly as most of the marketplace’s stalls had been made up with natural materials, easily combustible. 

 

The pragmatism of the sight and the hidden location; not so thriving with foot traffic of both locals and tourists alike. Always practical and effective, it had been a profound imperativeness of the killer, exemplified with the sacrilegious belief - both as a trophy, and quintessence of contempt and terrorism rampant in parts of Islamic countries. Even without running his fingertips along the jagged rough edges, he knows the woman had been brought to end, of her misery and Faustian deed after many fruitless attempts, brought to an abrupt end by muffled screams and muscle contractions.  This was what he was able to note immediately after coming face-to-face with the decapitated head;  _ the eyelids and lips of the almost guillotined woman still bore the sporadic contraction. The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible, leaving the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living, yet soulless eyes which were looking at me.  _

 

None of the jocund facade he maintained when both petrified and glorious feeling of excitement waned with noisome and pernicious effect when he came across the half-severed head, preserved more like an ancient artifact. 

 

Making his exit through the collapsed walls and broken wooden slats, an exposed wire offers a fluttering illumination of the outside world, the unrelenting sun baking the bone-dry earth with a hard crust. Then the light bulb shatters into a million pieces as Nigel attempts to flick off the light switch.

 

The issue of his soaring interest knocks all the barriers off as they had been nonexistent. Where the carnality of physical exertion metamorphoses into a dribbling abstraction; an incorrigible masterpiece of theatrical presentation. An installation of their fragility, the screaming of lambs transpiring into the eye of the beholder, revealing his truest and rawest nature. A profound radiation, feeling it down to his every fucking cell, until everything becomes subjugated by that lone sensation. 

 

_ Lions could wear the lamb’s mask and even lions weren’t shaped in adamantine.  _

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not very particularly fond of this chapter nor confident in my descriptions, this feels like one of those transitory chapters with boring details that needs to get out of my system. Sorry in advance.

The unfathomable depth of emotion swirls within the dark rims of Nigel’s hazel pupils as they reflect the cerulean hues of the rippling crescent waves of the ocean. The ribcages knock, becoming both a thumping dance of sheer excitement and infernal heatwave suffocating and desiccating the bronchi as his form comes alive with an intermittent thrum of trampoline propelling him to send him pouncing. 

 

Hannibal and Nigel’s form sinks further into the lush leather, to be encompassed within its searing heat. Hannibal’s penetrative maroon disappears beneath the rim of the panama hat and shades he wears, the sultry moist air soon morphs into a quenching breeze, as the paper-thin linen against their sun-seeped tanned skin glistens and seeps with more color. Its unmatched value soaring at $528,000 with less than 80.000 original miles, the definition of both graceful and harbinger of formidable beauty shone marvelously under the late summer sky, the gentle breeze blowing the sand along the Mediterranean en route to a small town called  _ El Jadida _ to pick up their completed garments, before making a detour to drop Hannibal off in  _ Casablanca _ .

 

Hannibal’s knowing smirk only extends beneath his impassive, placid as windless night where deadly silence had blanked them as he briefly recalls the day he had prepared the gift unbeknownst his brother. Nigel had been still slumbering into the late morning after taking a trip for a few days, he had just made home via the latest flight landing in  _ Fès–Saïss _ Airport just past midnight. The edge of the water had grown quieter, the sparkling array of the fine sand, along with the kissing waves, turning more effervescent with streaks of foamy band caresses the wheels as Hannibal leans against the door of the vehicle. A box of cuban cigar, wrapped daintily and tastefully wrapped black ribbon with silver trim sits atop of the hood as his head pendulously sways to and fro. 

 

Nigel wasn’t particularly known for his subtlety when it came to voicing out, or passive-aggressively instilling his transferred enthusiasm and interest over the four-wheeled vehicle just before his business trip to Europe and Hannibal, of course, had his plans to fulfill everything his brother wanted. With hefty inherit still sitting in his private bank in UBS as one of the high-net-worth individuals and his patients back in Baltimore adding the sum of money to his already impressive assets, it wasn’t a lavish gift that would leave a dent in his account. His particularly highly sought profession at the university also proved to be thriving, for both his income and meeting his pedantic interests. 

 

Hannibal’s unperturbed maroon penetrates between the negative space between Nigel’s head and the steering arm. Within the close distance, the foamy white bubbles as a continuous kiss upon the sparkling sandy stretch along the water’s edge. Truth be told, he had teetered between the brink of fitful sleep and vague slip that resemble the closest to the short nap. A fatigueness threads his pores as the unfolded strip of landscape, emerald and turquoise as he eases back into the comforting mold of the passenger seat. Mesmerized gaze taking the scenery to etch upon his subterranean mind, Hannibal retreats back to his mind palace and floats upon the crystal clear water, inaudibly humming  _ Bach’s Goldberg Variation _ as it streams upon with the rising heatwave. He dabs a faint film of sweat with a handkerchief, retrieved from his front pocket, which had been carefully folded as usual. Fighting off the speed of whooshing sound, a particularly steamy swirl whips across and almost tips his panama hat off. 

 

_ The blood in his veins, the breaths in his lungs, feels such a precious gift beyond the perceptible edge,  _ a kind of electricity seem to brew and gather inside his core like a spindrift sea in the distance; a strange sense of power agglomerating to form and settle itself deep inside Hannibal’s maroon eyes. The space which they occupy turns almost intangible, as if he’s drowned out all the silence, as black and obscure as  _ death _ itself. It was his own epitaph, an unintelligible one that grow into broken fragments of the tombstone he didn’t have yet. He thinks about his own brush with severing of the mortality when he had fallen back to the lump of all-consuming fire, the hole made through his composed poise as it flew out and tugged his hot blood to be blasted out. As much as Hannibal seemed unperturbed and immortal, his hidden  _ humanity _ and  _ virtuosity _ , that love had reduced him to be all muscles, aflame with sporadic quivering as he breathed out his last before succumbing to the exquisite flare. 

 

The cawing array of seagulls overhead, along with the rush of salty and sultry air caressing him in a sweet zephyr eggs on the sensation.  _ Yet _ , the dazed, drowning sensation continues to dominate the outer layers of the niche of Nigel’s mind, permeating within the core and giving an eerie and portent glow; snapshots turning into photomontages, piling up into forming a pastiche of the dead girl’s facade to come to life. Nigel feels the cold as ice, bitter than Baltimore December leech into the chambers of his heart. If Mischa had grown up, she would be the age of the girl who had met her untimely demise.  

 

Behind the shades and in his exquisite zone, Nigel squints through the gleam of orange glow turning into a silvery blade. Making those still individual faces coming into life before his unwavering gaze, he could feel the minute spasms travel down the muscles of his heavily tanned cheeks as the harsh smack of light contours along the length of his craned neck. He wishes to unspool his brain inch by inch and decipher all the recollections for Hannibal to see. Nigel’s memories weren’t  _ eidetic _ or refined like Hannibal’s per say, but he was highly intuitive and overwhelmed with thinking that he wished to shut it off in the time of his welcoming respite. However  _ fleeting _ .  

 

The scrap of the truth, he very well knows, that the sight he hadn’t scrutinized would be as equally gruesome, if not and most likely, more horrendous than that swollen, irregular serrated surface of the decapitated head, with the spray of blood erupted from the carotid and wetting the undiscovered body. The sand turns coarse and rough like a burst of gunfire, as he shakes off the lingering blood, spreading forth from the girl’s stomach as it blooms greedily against the contour of the lifeless limb, drained of vigor and tinge of healthy glow. 

 

Memories paste onto the pensive of his mind like rare stamps, recollecting each and every minute movement that the dead girl had made through. A barbaric dance, insistently and with quiet violence. A striking epiphany consummates along with her expiration - that each and every individual, were capable of being reduced into an  _ insect _ , a ravening beast without ever creating the potent image of self and a lump of meat. To be  _ damaged _ ,  _ degraded _ and  _ slaughtered _ like a fucking pig. An inevitable fate of the humankind as he had faced his own so many times. 

 

Riding his prized  _ 1961 Jaguar E-Type Convertible _ in vivid red, redder than the rusted blood that seeped beneath his fingerprints and lingering in eternity as if a personal bottle of cologne, courtesy of Hannibal for their most recent birthday half a year ago, Nigel feels transparent and astray - a  _ paradox _ upon such a familiar feeling he had let himself bask countless times feels as he continued his notorious crimes. The feeling of helplessness, so uncharacteristic as he himself had taken an irreversible mutation along his miscreant ways. Like he had been sprinting away from the abhorrent recount of details, the winding road snaking through the fields and mountains as his breathing becomes constricted, as if a fireball had been lodged in his solar plexus, completely parching his lung tissue of oxygen. 

 

Hearing even the minutest of fraying veins and bursts of blood along the way as tissues and sinews and muscles ravaged through teeth and claws. Each little stain painting the road in a surefire sign for him to not get lost upon the irresistible spell of destructiveness and calamity. Every tangible record of violence which threads upon every somatic cell within him. His memory never left scars nor it never heals - it leaves a muddy milky discharge upon everywhere he goes. Rather than fading with the passage of time, the _fundamental_ _crudeness_ of human being coagulates and resides within him like a strand of DNA. 

 

Jolting out of the vivid thread of terrifying daydream, Nigel feels the intermittent reverberation flare through the tightened grip along the steer wheel. A relatively empty road with outstretched sky, the clumps of mingled clouds clearing up to reveal its cerulean and emerald sky, unfathomable as the pigmented color intensify with dazzling brightness unspools like a reel of film. Then, all of a sudden, the car zooms out through the square among the small downtown area of El Jadida, practically empty without the hubbub of crowds occupying the space. There are only monochrome figures clustered near the fountain and the promenade in groups of two or three as the noon sun continues to flare its blinding light upon the sun-baked earth and cobblestones. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I totally quoted Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and I'm not ashamed.

Maintaining his withdrawn composure and poise, Hannibal’s fingers slowly brush upon the doorframe of the convertible as his gaze locked in a distance. The last onslaught of heatwave before a blissful lick of cool caress would soon seep beneath the intricately fine weave of their fancy staple; creased and weathered with endless whistles of twigs and leaves, to become the endless sources to better the world and also darken it further. Even the change of garments, their sun-tanned faces creased with more heartfelt emotions and forms compacted into wondrous muscles, sinews and hardened flesh, resonates within Hannibal’s head a moment before trailing a finger round the impeccably shined surface. His steps as merry as he could be as his maroon slightly narrows in pensive contemplation - the fire-pit emitting the fragrant aroma of the herbs with the fall-off-the-bone meat, his personal brew Nigel had an especially irresistible penchant for emptying out the wine barrels as he slips into a bibulousness night.

 

Then, the lengthy dinner could come to an abrupt end, as honored guests slowly ebb away as they begin a journey as a wayfarer. Some would escape _unscathed_ , one unfortunate would face his _unleashed wrath_. Full of gurgling blood, the constriction of the chest, the quivering limbs as the soul wavers between life and death. That ultimately profound slip of a nanosecond where the baneful pain, along with such beautiful hatred, foams over in the form of whirling smoke and plumage of blood ribbons.

 

A legend begins with a truth, but soon, Nigel’s own imagination takes over and his conflicting recollections tell different accounts to add new segments and chapters and addendum to keep it alive. Things had been left at vague, they were twisting and turning, like the churning water breaking waves as they bruised and battered his side. A bitter chill creeps into the atmosphere as none of his usual triumphant smirk, _cruel_ , _entertained_ , _gloating_ , wipes off from his overworked psyche. The projected column of hot air, _heart-ripping, spirit-soaring_ yet his mind is becoming more of a blur. The muzzle is as hot as if it had been pressed upon the perpetrator’s head. The taker of the life not deemed worthy upon the arsenal of names he had within him. Perhaps his desire to wipe them off like swatted flies had persevered more than those who wanted him dead in return.  

 

Perhaps they both were utterly _desperate_ , each a prisoner of their determined, headstrong mind. When Nigel’s own had been etched with wafting breeze of crimson and both _healing_ and _destructive_ force standing right next to him like a spectre of grim reaper himself, he had reached the solstice of living and thriving. Nigel’s body still feels as if he would _disintegrate_ \- shattered into a million pieces of golden light like sparks of a firecracker. The glittering pieces would whirl and rain down through every rooms within the concrete structure until his tainted soul finally gets picked up in a fog over the river. Beyond the gates of limbo. A high cliff, caved in by dark mountains. A huge flaming gate built into their side as the darkness seeps between the slatted bars. It bathes in stifling heatwave, desiccating his skin as more billows of fog and flame progressively advancing his transformation - the creature born out of wayfare and debauchery, full of numerous festering wounds, decomposing corpses, swollen bodies looking more like inflated balloons, this mere sight of putrid refections leaving his impassive mask to set in stone into a practitioner of pragmatism.

 

This has what it came down to - he either gets overwhelmed with prospect of overly-charged-emotion or he abjures through his characteristic lifestyle, of letting his usual milieu go, which had been held in his captive for so long. The last stretch of verve carrying him with a deluge of crimson as his tensed muscles and taut neck and shoulders finally relax upon the invisible hands of a masseuse. _Whatever this… Spectre, a fallen angel, a demon, whatever the fuck this entity was that had claimed his brain,_ it was a one of a fucking kind.

 

“We’re finally here,” an audible exhale before Hannibal’s maroon lays somewhere between the high, gravelled, yet bleak colored wash of gray among the compacted square as the vehicle snakes through the narrow alleyways. “I’ve longed to return here for so long.” Nigel’s treading around the steps of the promenade with the aforementioned cigar Hannibal had gotten him for their birthday, before they enter through the no smoking sign of the front gate of the grandeur of a restaurant. Hannibal had already made his private reservation behind one of the shaded off porticos and although he wasn’t a huge fan of those filtered, mass-produced cigarettes, he could appreciate the depth and cornucopia of flavor notes that mild bodied short, little cigar could offer. The red ripple of the sea still etched upon his sight as a particularly intense ray sweeps through the boulevard, Nigel watches the smoke shroud his vision before trailing slow as if sauntering into the air. Hannibal plucks it out of Nigel’s loose fingers and takes a short drag.

 

A languid lift of his blooming hazel, like the blooming crimson exhibition of abstract field painting, turns more atmospheric as he wakes up from the fanciful dream, taking the shape in his mind. Hannibal’s words ring like the morning chime of the bell; _was it a signal of another unfolding day, or his funeral as a requiem permeates through the chapel?_ The propellant surge of waves, beating like a succession of too rapid jabs and hooks as his still, empty and absent gaze drowns slowly, gradually beneath the whirling ripple of crimson, now tinged with lush crescents of golden orange from the overhead as the flickering light signals a complete darkness.

 

 _No, mocking god doesn’t end here along with the brush of his humanity._ Through his miasmic yet capable mind, Hannibal is still, permanently and sempiternally and wholly himself. Brutal and tender, grotesque and sublime. Even when having faced with the looming permanent cessation of vitality.

 

Hannibal could feel his spine curl, the spawning amusement presented within the serpentine curl of lips. So long, the virulent act itself had manifested itself into a twisting and gleaming blade upon Nigel’s healing wounds. All jagged edges with bitter cynicism towards the dead - long gone, charred, reduced down to ash and stardust. His raging fire contained beneath the orbs which seem to sway in a pendulum. Finding disadvantageous as he mulls over the shared past and his own. Not only through Hannibal and his interleaved flesh and blood, their lives were never truly separate through distance and absence of each other’s presence in their lives- he had witnessed and gone through Hannibal’s death, that nine-year-old boy who had collapsed upon with his soul suspended in air, on the cusp of trembling down upon the crystals glittering like jewels. While Hannibal became something else entirely other than the human identity he wears, a true Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde., perhaps more like a fallen archangel who became a harbinger of collecting corrupted souls, sowing the undeserved lives. His own came in more of a self-destructive way; like a laser-like light being swallowed by the unfathomable abyss of obsidian water.

 

“Just this, languidness translated into an orchestration of sights, both otherworldly and tangible,” his gaze slightly growing wistful, uplifted Hannibal shoots a gaze before Nigel snatches the cigar back, now half-gone. He shoots a feigned irksome look before watching the tobacco leaves crackle beneath his fingertips, the warmth matching the onslaught of sultry heat wave and the intensifying aroma of the succulent meat, long marinated in a mixture of spices and herbs, drawing out the flavor. The weight of the world off _his_ shoulders. Nigel’s seem to slouch with more imminent weight _on_ his, but usually, that’s how he is when he’s relaxed, as he withdraws information.

 

He’s still skeptical how this abominably cruel crime could ever be linked to Hannibal’s own, as they hadn’t particularly thrived with mutilating the corpses as they would most often savor the meat. They were all about consuming people and taking their power, take their love so it becomes part of themselves as well. No, this was someone who had lost his or her temper. Seeing red all over the fucking place.

 

_The truth is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution._

 

Nigel lets it pass, treads slowly towards Hannibal after taking another short puff from the cigar before his sensuous curving lips draw together, the ridge of his nose slowly pushing into his doppelganger’s. Through a slight exhaustion, a palpable rush of energy exchanges through their breaths.

 

A compacted array of ancient with modern, an interspersed unique mix of Arabic and French rings with mellifluous tones. Both so utterly _familiar_ and _exotic_. A cornucopia of different accents and eclectic mix of races flooding through the streets in the peak of lunch hour. The stifling air carries both silent whispers and ruckus of the streets as the hubbub pierces through their now-closed convertible.

 

“We should stop by to grab a light fare, there’s an excellent _kefta tagine_ place you sure would enjoy,” Hannibal had already done his extensive research, as he had once visited this exquisite city with Portugese walls. Where influx of locals mingle with international visitors at this time of the year, the small town itself is reaching the peak of the season with its thriving tourism and nightlife. Within the caverns of their hearts, both twins let their lungs fill with the salty ripple as they push themselves out.  Nigel would surely thrive in this sleepy, yet well-maintained atmospheric city full of flocking crowds streaming onto the boulevards. The streamlined, sleek body of the vehicle pulls over the location near _Mazagan_ , giving its old-walled town a very different new lease of life. “It better be fucking spectacular, I’m starving.” Nigel’s voice is deep and throaty, as if sleep is still reluctant to let him go after a few hours. His eyes are the most hazelest with light green specks widening along the rims and warm with percolated emotions.

 

“Have I ever disappointed you with my remarkable choice of gourmand excellency? Lamb minced with garlic, fresh coriander and parsley, cinnamon and ground coriander is rolled into balls and cooked in a tomato and onion sauce,” Hannibal pauses and swallows, tipping the brim of his panama hat as his deep-set orbs glimmer as a particularly dazzling sparkle of the Mediterranean sea. Everything seem so far away, yet so pressed close. Even when their bodies aren’t pressed, not even close enough to feel the other’s presence. “ Just before the dish is ready, eggs are cracked into depressions in the sauce and soon everything is cooked to perfection. Who knows your palate better than I?”

  
Hannibal lifts the brim of the sunglasses and looks through the edge of the shaded lens, his sharp maroon giving a hint of glimmer before throwing a wistful glance at his brother. Minus the exotic spices, the modest fare hadn’t strayed away from their meat and sauce heavy counterpart they were so used to eating in their native country, or in Paris as young adolescents. Food transcends the places they had been, and even in the midst of the place where they felt more like wayward, wanderlust explorers than locals, they could find solace with the nimble, talented hands of the chef.


	10. Chapter 10

With a whirling blur traveling slower than speed of sound as if there were silencer holes on the barrel of the fucking gun, Nigel could almost hear the tiny click, that distinguishable click of sonic boom as the gas escapes through the drilled holes. A silencer would’ve been ideal, but with the right placements and risking losing his hand permanently (he had only tested out once and his limb remained intact), the bullet would only split through the air in a bare whisper. The ambiance is a thousands of soul gatherer as the walls reek an amalgamation of scents of the  _ past _ and  _ unknown _ ; the wicked traces and wretched auras of recollections seeped into crumbling walls on the brink of demolition. 

 

The horrid spectacle of this place reminds him of the Baltimore joint Hannibal had arsoned after Nigel’s unexpected  assault - those who had barely survived Hannibal’s sheer wrath and carnage would have gurgled their blood, breathed in the fumes and suffocated with their blood and noxious ashes as everything reduced into burnt soot and coal. The place still lingered with thrilling energy of the previous night where the devouring flames had been merciful enough to leave a fading sign of life, etched through the walls in numerous ghastly forms and caressed with a touch of destructiveness. Indecipherable and incoherent mingle of desiccated skeletons and shattered remnants of glasses tell the sheer atrocity of Hannibal’s wrath, expanded upon the surroundings like radiation. 

 

He didn’t need a story or a tangible real world to keep up with this recollection for him to carry on. Trails of dust like footprints of snow, the skeletal structure and his presence upon the darkness as his lips are sealed with pieces of this place. Fingertips sewing into the brokenness as the fire in his heart couldn’t simply turn the past as it extinguishes into ashes. 

 

_ Scars never healed; they just were covered with a new, sensitive pink blossom of caressing flesh, as the surrounding tissues desperately protect the evidence of the twisting metamorphosis of his soul. _

 

Now Nigel is dressed in his usual tight-fitting short-sleeve linen shirt, collar undone, few buttons unfastened with a well-worn leather jacket as a wave of strange chill creeps beneath the loose flaps around the collar, plastered along the mold of his reversed-triangle figure. Like a sculptor with his chisel bearing the stone dust, he is sempiternally permeated with stale rusty blood and putrid clumps of shit and innards. The stagnant, fetid air with empty broken shells with faded souls and traces of virulent fingerprints. Hell’s milky way unfolded upon the enigmatical confinement of the ravaged surroundings, tormented by the fundamental nature of the place.  

 

Gleaming orbs effectively hidden behind the veil of his drenched locks, droplets dripping to mark his whereabouts, his stealthy feet soon erases the only trace of his movement. Slender as his muscles tether and coil taut, he could feel each pore responding to even the slightest sound. The rhythmic echo of the droplets, the very air he breathes in ebb and flow. All is counteractive right now. His body wants to shut down, be unplugged, while his mind is at its full operation. Senses honed to fine perfection, precise as ever.

 

His demeanor changes under the raw bodily reaction of fluttering heartbeats, growing impassive and sangfroid as he senses another’s presence upon the space. His hazel pools brimming with sparks of embers as his back straightens once again. The Greek statue of a man with angular, exotic features taking in the veiled deception, about to infiltrate and befriend this figure of utmost importance.

 

“Pleasure to be your acquaintance,”  _ oh, how he misses his gaudy, flamboyant, flashy club, full of eclectic people, solely present to relinquish themselves in the night of debauchery.  _ Nigel’s voice slightly dips and gravels through his clicking throat, a slight displease etched upon the corner of his curled lips. The rambunctious music, along with DJs, the table booth full of never-ending streams of booze and cheap liquor are few of the things he misses dearly. He looks upon the professor and wonders if Hannibal had already made his fucking acquaintance with this pompous ass.

 

He perceives his bated breath, as if he had been engaged in slow awakening. Having crossed some kind of ripping and having been in a cared position after taking a determined charge. Faded colors return behind a slight scowl sketching the corner of his eyes and lips as a healthy glow conglomerates like swirling vortex. Even the predators needed recuperation, as the lion feigns to wear the lamb’s mask.  

 

Through the plastered fabric of his thin white shirt, he could feel the shivering lick of his spine as both frustration and anticipation flares in his hazel pools. Sparkling with diamonds, he briefly gazes back at this unknown stranger. The awkward, unsettling air takes a peep over their distance and hangs gravidly in the sky.  _ Pale, luminous and haunting. _ Like a painting, as hyper-realistic as it gets and he registers through his diaphanous eyes that it’s indeed not conceptual, but all he could do is to stare at it.

 

The unknown brings two strikingly opposite sensations - he had always coveted to be adventurous, fearless and confident. Always on the move as a vagabond all his life. The mere enthusiasm to find something new and refreshing his brain had him to move in his usual brisk swaggering and the shift of his hips, making firm and precise movements propelled his boost in confidence and his egotistical mannerisms. Though, the slight, almost imperceptible furrow of his brows confirm that he had been more than a bit anxious for him to admit. Eyes darting as the courteous, he would call it in the term of ‘chivalrous’ gesture of the man aids him to exit the vehicle, to get his head straightened. Taking an unnecessary swallow, his teeth gently presses against his lower lip as he takes a sharp intake of breath.

 

“ _ Mayne _ , I’ve heard a lot about you,  _ an ex-criminal turned investigator _ , I recall,” a condescending smirk etches as the man’s chin tilt up. Nigel’s partner, Jasper, is standing beside the professor and rummages through the dusted debris as his legs stomp through the weathered support which had been once a bartop counter.

The man, who has about twenty pounds on him with a couple of inches subtracted from his own, stares and flings back the intensity Nigel is giving him with his usual unblinking and seemingly unperturbed hazel.

 

Arms clasp behind body just underneath the holster where the gun is pressing into his side, walking briskly as his head lifts, sensing a movement within the penumbra of the organic form that looks something other than a human. As he registers the change of negative spaces, he could make out the crawling form of a slender woman making the way toward him. Maybe this was his supposed dream as his mind whirled back a few hours ago, removed from this wretched place.

_ Undeniably bizarre and system shocking, he’s immediately transported back to the city of El Jadida. _

 

Yet, the lunch, the succulent meat that doesn’t need even chewing, as it would have absorbed all the juices and flavors of the herbs and seasonings, along with the sleek yolk as it caresses his more refined palate, everything pleasurable, is simply  _ gone _ . Copulatory pleasures, along with gourmandizing the local fares like he and his twin had done so many times, is now marred by his weariness and fatigue, all the overwhelming onslaught of venomous drops. The death itself is an  _ enchantress _ and a  _ seductress _ , without ever grazing the outwardly surface as that alone would drop him dead before even hitting the ground. With an equally firm hold as he doesn’t budge and reciprocates. Her hands are icy pricks against his gaze, reminiscent of both the coiled cobra ready to strike and a tamed beast, with a disguise of a black leopard purring against the trainer’s petting. Both feral, also precisely and deceptively feigned with the innocence he lost long time ago. 

 

His still heart pumps with the cloying scent of adrenaline, pouring and materializing into a deluge into his brain, synapses firing, the slender fingers tingling with the anticipation. The aura transfers and spins to wrap around both of them. He scars from neverending flare of flames, as seconds turn minutes, hours turn weeks. The smeared streaks manifest into much more pleasant imageries from hours ago. 

 

_ The aromatic mellow aged red of Rioja reservas, as it rolls against his tastebuds, B’stilla, that flaky, cinnamony goodness with an array of shaved, toasted almonds from Fassi cuisine Hannibal raved about, gunpowder tea steeped with spearmint that cleansed the palate Nigel especially liked simply because it was called Moroccan whiskey without hindering dose of alcohol that remotely came close to the real one…  and their fucking garments.  _ Snapshots of memories, too fleeting to solidify them into his brain, too quick-moving against the very imagery he bores as now. 

 

_ “That offal they would savor along with the guests of honor in the form of pâté en croûte with layered meats stuffed in a crusty loaf. Stuffed thigh roast with dates, baked in clay, creates more succulent meat and an added theatricality to the feast. To wrap everything up, I am planning to have a raspberry puffed pastry with truffle and chocolate shavings.“ _

  
_ “This tender exploration through the exquisite gustatory explosion reminds me of one simple thing; your body,”  _ Hannibal had stated in his own beautiful metaphor. Not only the gourmand to appreciate each ingredients, both trivial and much sought out; the lighting, their movements, a relatively soundless harmony of something primeval, carnal and visceral. Their shifting limbs advancing with a progression of scenes. Lurching from tenderness to violence, with no expanse of palate unexplored. It’s their drawn-out moment of both purification and taintedness. Disillusioned and enveloped by that warm image, Nigel wishes this particular sticky, unwanted encounter to draw to a swift close. 


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know this chapter makes much sense, but it's Nigel pointing his fingers down at the professor for that crime, which reminds him of how Mischa's cessession of mortality came about.

Nigel feels the bile rise as he hears a familiar click of his throat, an invisible force constricting every inch of the coiled muscle as he draws a lengthy, slow breath before squinting through the blinding ray of afternoon sun spilling forth the ravaged building. This is breaching his own moral _event horizon_ , the _very_ boundary he desperately wished he’d never cross. He still has to, there’s no turning his back for what he has gotten himself into. A discrepancy upon those pendulous, two of the most vivid, carnal and visceral imagery bracing him in a system-shocking undulation.

 

He immediately slips back into his brooding, pensive mode as the gray matter within his skull quickly winds up the clockwork. The one-army bravado of a fucker brimming with undetonated bomb of fury wouldn’t let anyone leave a dent upon his self-assured composure. Nor a fucking _doctorate_ degree would reduce him in any way for him to feel inferior. Seemingly, the professor who had introduced as _Dr. Jean Durand_ , a Ph.D holder in criminal psychology, along with Jasper had been engaged in a lengthy talk about the recent discovery of a young woman’s decapitation.

 

“ _Alexandra Constantin,_ just turned twenty-three, last seen just off the end of this street towards the intersection.” Jasper begins the short briefing, along with Dr. Durand’s remark about the girl having originated from _Romania_ , where Nigel had made his habitat for quite some time. Jasper knows this to a certain degree, just enough that Nigel had truly been living like a vagabond with an adventurous spirit, but as Nigel wears a feigned mask of _Mayne_ now, he has no intention of entertaining the doctor with the same epic journey which had ended with him in this foreign land now screaming with desolation.

 

_No, Hannibal had steered away from prodding into his rather labyrinthine mind, so he’s not gonna have this fucking preposterous gloat jab and stir through his past._

 

The faint haloes ripple across the unreality of it all, as his dilated hazel, overly blown with etched crimson spreading faster than fungi gazes and struggles to focus with initial glance along the strewn photos. The built-up grime hindering his sight to register the form to materialize into a tangible corporeality. The splitting images of _her_ , halves growing into eights, into thousands of severed connections continues to warp his perception. As he gazes into undulating mirage, the only sensation that he is aware, painfully striking against everything else which mars the sense of gravity is his own fingers clutching himself with a vice grip, enough to dig his talon-like fingers and break the curve of the underlying bones.

 

The danky atmosphere had already degraded into rotting putridness inside him, desolate and muggy, with withered petals and clumps of vines manifesting into lodged lumps in his throat. An invisible shackle placed around his ankles as his spine tingles with tenseness, the petrification becomes too burdensome and weighty for him to be liberated from. _Are you fucking real or an apparition from my reverie?_

 

With the curtain drawing back with his arteries around his form revolving faster than the galloping hoofprints of the stallion, his tunnel vision dawns only on _her_ as the trepidation reaches to his own sounds of broken pieces. The near lunacy from his part, nothing would reduce into apathy when it comes to her, there might be stone-coldness, chillier than arctic biting whirl of a snowstorm, but it had been suffocated by the ash-like blackness from too much generated heat, enough to disintegrate and pin him down in a heap of brokenness.

 

It’s like dark woods closing in around him, the stark lines of trees buried in obsidian blanket of seemingly incomprehensible expanse of sky flicker and sway beneath in front of his eyes like inky fireworks. The innumerable fragments of cities, small towns and roads he had been in reduces into a visible fragments, floating on the roof of forests like clumps of clouds, interconnected and swept away through the warm undulation of heatwave. When he had been on the balcony and it’s too dark to take a plunge or to do anything but wait for the stars, Nigel had thought of _her_ often. _Mischa_. Not quite the subject of his charge, yet she had been like the sky; expansive, all-encompassing, surreal and dangerous. _They took away her freedom to love._

 

Letting Dr. Durand’s self-assured accounts of possible modus operandi which could’ve used in order to achieve such clean cut along the spinal cord and jugular, dissipate into his miasmic daydream, the professor’s gravelly voice merely becomes a silencing cacophonous hum upon Nigel’s head before he plummets into his wildly vivid journey down the path. The oxygen seem to claw through his constricted throat as if he had been _time-traveling_.

 

Feeling _disembodied_ , sitting like a meaningless, floating shadow at the ledge looking over the landscape of a skyline buried beneath the inky Mediterranean, he had sometimes pondered until the dark tide of the night, along with the marvelous tranquil moon caressed him with its enigmatic presence. The documentation of his previous scars healed, yet they become an acid drops that eat away at him - all the mistakes he had been trying to overcome. Along the flaring nerve endings agglomerating to become too dark.

 

All the good things ever happened to him had already been corroded and tainted. Yet, each memory had been preserved like fossilized recollections and remains to be treacherously vivid and perceivable. It had been exactly a month since their last encounter, the only passersby amongst sea of unknown faces and among the pariah of guests from the ostentatious charity event, yet it’s so easy to immerse himself in the pool of strands of memory, like an artwork grazing his soul. The sharpest pieces turn scalding than hand grenade shrapnel to perforate through his overworked heart, _his shattered self._

 

He’s alone in the space, the faint glow luminesces like an ethereal light as the dusted surface of the old light bulb emits gentle sparkling sound just over his head. The girl is cornered, frightened, her unfathomable jade green with cerulean blue specks drip with parden. Of course, Nigel knew about this girl extensively along with her older sister, _Elena_ , who he had hired when he had been still reigning terror in Bucharest.

 

_Through incomparable bitterness, desperation and ruefulness, he watches with helpless gaze. His weak limbs, appearing too emaciated and pallid with ghastly skin, as if drained of his usual vigor and virility. the vast sky seem to crush him in, the immaculateness, the symbolism of purity has been already tainted with his traumatic experience. He knows he had been absolutely powerless at that time and even if he had tried, all of his efforts would have been reduced useless._

 

_The scent of death still heavily lingers in the air in his mind, until he feels like he’s suffocating with the revolting scent of the blood and sinews, pulverized and disintegrated until he couldn’t even recognize who it was. Like a demon waiting for his sacrificed prey, he sees a horrible streak of light through it all - he had chosen a survivalist’s way out, instead of suffering in the merciless bout of the mother earth._

 

_He had fortified the barriers as high as the castle walls, indestructible, unreachable, yet there had been a single profound weakness. whoever clever enough would be able to round the obstruction and find their way in. they would slowly tear, rip, gnaw apart the small fiber, becoming threads and holes that held his fragile heart together. an illusion, yet painfully tangible and not merely ostensible. Its essentialness an inescapable shackle upon his psyche._

 

_The intangible reality continually becomes a lucid dream, the disturbing images of his sister immediately plucks his brimming unconsciousness-like reverie back to stark and vivid reality. Pulverized bones rattling against mama’s pot, scarlet spectacle that not even the nutritious soil could ever embrace along with flayed skin still screaming for the previous precious life it lived. His frantic breaths suctioned right out of him as his mentally exhausted body becomes numb with something akin to a sleep paralyzation._

 

_Feeling an invisible hand, full of gnarled and desiccated limbs without a source of life present in talon-like charred hook grasp the frenetically beating muscle, each inch of vein shrieks in brewing rainstorm, turning every living organism down to rust._

 

Against his clean and effortless methods of disposing his potential victims with close-range execution style headshots, this spectacle of all wretchedness combined a sadistic mutilation, along with severing limbs and sexual assault. Engorged petals were wiped clean of semen. If Mischa had grown up, encased in flawless alabaster skin, the dulcinea in his arms, prettier, sweeter and brighter-eyes shut with brimming spawn of emotions tugging at both ends. His extent arms particularly feel measly, the falcon’s wingspan merely reduced to that of a vulnerable chick.

 

Beneath the fold of his linen shirt, his broad shoulders slightly rolls back, the hugeness of his build beyond how he usually carries himself. His posture grows taut, and a bit wary, a reprehension threading into the sun-kissed skin. But there was something else about his energy too. A certain _excitement_ , some kind of _thirsting_. He could nearly scent the adrenaline bubbling over his veins, the same that warned him when inevitable violence brewed in a rowdy pub, or a fight were waxing from words to fists. _There would be some battle in these chambers tonight._

 

Then, his mind clicks - no matter what he does, the pain will still be there. They’re so much more than memories or pasts. Living inside of Lecters as faces connect. Muscles better and nerves more. _Do you feel the spine of your body and its bones tremble with fear of exposure?_

 

_Voice catches in his throat as the tightness, then pulsing continues. Thrusting, engaged, the weight of him increases as throes of release nears. Both fluid and appalling. The spiralling vortex intensifies as an abrupt cascade, an unimaginable heat and pressure becomes loss for words. Seemingly like an eternity before the whirling dizziness clutches and sinks, head tipped back, his solid grounding presence dissipated before the thudding weight sinks like an anchor._

 

 _You, the one equally devious as he wears a duplicity of a faux mask. You, pertaining and pretending to be a socialite among Hannibal’s wide circle of guests of honor in his supposed ticket to grandiosity. You, who sought compelling beauty within repellent and putrid nature, worse than the onslaught of stale metallic tang of blood invading through his nostrils._ As his body had propelled as he sprinted to clear the crates full of rotten fruits and vegetables before, it only takes a fraction of a second for him to engage in a battle mode. The extension of his body drawn with poised stature. Eyes as if he wants to swallow the other man whole. _You would melt into me and flow through my veins, forever along with Mischa and her._


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's extremely late, I have been struggling to gain inspiration and my mind has been drawing a blank.

The stench alone permeates through the fibers of his light linen garment. The  _ stench _ of the man’s vile veil. Worse than the purulent matter maturating before it discharges. This is more than the reality Nigel had bargained for, and his guard had been completely down. Even when he’s not provoked, he feels he had been bombarded with a recurrent series of jabs and hooks, which leave a permanent, yet invisible mark on his coppery skin, already having been through a cannonade of shots and gashes.

 

Like what Aristotle said,  _ what prompts us to action is desire; and desire has three forms—appetite, passion and wish. _ But this? This is a work of a mere  _ butcher _ . Earthly and savage. Even he himself had the moment of lapse, that lapse of control he had learned through Hannibal’s guidance. Kneecaps blown off, blood pouring like a broken open hydroelectric dam as he bathed in iron and metallic tang. He didn’t even look into the fleeting conscious of the man’s deep azure orbs as the wicked soul stares within his hazel, growing smoky along the deepening night.  

 

A remarkable  _ archive _ to be celebrated upon. They manifest into multitudes of  _ aneurysms _ within his blood vessels. Shudders running violently, eyelashes fluttering in agitation and fingers trembling with every little sensation. He could hear the reverberating mutter in blank incomprehension. _ He’s the culprit and he’s fucking worse than Hannibal. _ Masquerading as he summons all of his strength as if opening his throat to sing while his heart is on the verge of fitting to burst. Through the pale gleam of the intermittent street lights that render everything to reduce into indistinguishable blended swirling smokes, he thinks, at least Hannibal’s carefully constructed one functioned with shared  _ morality _ alongside with his, coalescing enough for the boundaries to become indistinguishable.

 

He’s the quintessential epitome of chewed over gum that had been dipped into citric acid crystals to provide oneself with such sought-after zesty and invigorating flavor. Until he grows useless with incapacitations and as he regains the tenacious quality and resistance of a rubber; the natural progression of his miraculously clinging life, which never seems to cease will continue amongst the  _ hypocrite’s masquerade of virtues. _

 

He fights the relentless urge to withdraw his revolver there and then; even perceiving Trevor’s own firearm and the professor’s more than enough capability to reduce the wholesome body into severed fragments and limbs of bones and marrows, the lost souls still lingering upon the ravaged ravines of skeleton and organs. The urge is  _ unstoppable _ , like a continuous torrent streaming out of him as his aura seem to boil over with fiery bubbles. He’s  _ writhing _ inside, compelled by the need to engage in a  _ brutal savagery _ , to retaliate his own version of Hammurabi’s code.

 

Even when he’s completely empty in pain thanks to all the benumbing clutch of drug coursing through his thrumming veins, he’s manic with the persistent urge for bloodshed.  _ Not his damned own. _ He could literally taste the gurgling blood upon his throat as if his had been slit open.  _ Life is such a fucking strange thing to perceive _ , he thinks, even when he had been still affected with the horridness of fading colors, as he regained strength, persevering through the numerous drills of spears onto his body as the threading curves held onto his severed flesh, rippling beneath each fluttering ebb and flow of his heart, then a reverberation. It blankets him like a  _ heartless sea _ \- he gets swept away by merciless gales and his seemingly smaller, tanned form gradually comforting him like the warm waves of the broad daylight.

 

While he had encountered Hannibal’s vehement patience slip thin by the rude man’s offensive remarks as his  _ impeccable _ ,  _ graceful _ and seemingly  _ incorruptible _ demeanor change into his own usual bilious air a few nights ago, Nigel would’ve have succumbed to his usual  _ bumptiousness _ without ever thinking about its consequences. A  _ feint _ before decking the deserved with a  _ fierce right cross _ . Then he’d have the man’s head blown off with a  _ deliberate _ arc of his arm as the surface of the bullet would already have etched the man’s name on it.

 

He will hurt Dr. Durand for this, he doesn’t know how yet, but he needs time to mull over and percolate; a day will come when he thinks himself happy and safe and suddenly, all the contentment will turn into dust and ashes in his mouth. And when he does, it’d be too late. Through all the unsaid words, he apologizes to his own heart for backing out from this endeavor, but as much as he had been known to be reckless and carefree; it’s not the lack of  _ courage _ nor his fleeting yearning and  _ limerence _ towards his dented past. It’s the weird  _ frisson _ , an aura that combines an earthly sense of duty as well as his ferment effort to find better alternatives.

 

“You would have to excuse me, gentlemen, I have rather fucking imperative matter I have to attend to, why don’t you wrap this up and I will pick this up whenever it’s more convenient.”

 

There would be no avenge and their quest to elevate the sounders to profound transformation to masterpieces would be not quite done yet, even with the change of their surroundings. Killing is  _ addictive _ and it’s not some kind of  _ factitious enthusiasm _ he’s slipped into. Humans are capable of sinking into inveterate magnetism of violence and they’re merely acting on their supremacy. A poor slapdash of pig elevated into a profound tableau to be appreciated upon, as an inferior imitation metamorphoses into a virtuoso’s masterpiece. Yet, the spilled words ooze with such an eldritch diversion as he feels more so conflicted - he’d rather have the white-hot bullet driving into his heart to be expunged by white paint than watching the victim’s face blacken and swell as the features turn into festering ulcers, the contours that defined Alexandra, has crumbled into ambiguity as no clear edges had left to recognize her in whole. Like an imprinted shadow among the world of living before her soul had been shucked off as a snake sheds its skin.

 

“We’re about to wrap our assessment soon, so as soon as we’re done, I’ll report you back immediately,” Jasper quips and Nigel can immediately pick up from that moment, his dichotomy between thought and action becomes more mutually exclusive and Nigel’s filled with more hatred; those fucking filthy, rotting faces, reeking in the slanting sun as features become a mere ectoplasm of miasmatic carbon monoxide as they burn.

 

_ Evil feeds off a source of apathy and the devoid of the humanity isn’t the weakness in his mind. _ Perhaps less capable than the typical psychopath by the book, yet neither Hannibal and he felt incapable. More so him, but as siblings go, Hannibal always had that upper edge, that blurred distinction between his humanity and niche, a hint of superiority over all.  With these desultory thoughts wandering through his mind, he recalls having watched his brother’s anger manifest into a festival of  _ schadenfreude _ , as his wondrous mind would have concocted a meticulous mapping of how the body should be elevated to carry the paragon of animals as limbs translated into strokes, the beauty upon the brusque world, into tableaus. 

 

The putrid remnant of tainted humanity which resonates from the professor’s greedy fingertips, blackened with flecks of dried blood and clumps of blonde hair, blood raining down as great blood-red gashes of meat tears off from the bones and cartilages. He could literally scent it like a rabid dog with amplified Cutting through the mouthwatering taste buds still bearing the rich fibers of the lamb. Another predator upon the vast world, Nigel mulls over,  _ I’ll soon reduce you into the helpless rack of lamb. _ Feeling his throat click and close as he feels bile rise through, his forehead pinched tight as corroded rust and chipped crevices fills his lungs further. It’s more malignant and harmful than the surge of nicotine he drags, deep into the bronchi as the usual calming agent renders his edging conscious futile.

 

His  _ true nature _ resided better with the suffocating dust, dawning like the heavy noxious mist that would spread faster than the breaking weir where against his better judgment, he would rummage through as if exploring an uncharted territory. He doesn’t know if the sun will be wholly  _ beneficial _ , having an ounce of  _ benevolence _ , rather than smiting him with an incinerating blast that would only leave him shrieking as he disintegrates into carbon and stardust, as he reduces to what he originated from.  _ Maybe _ , just  _ maybe _ what he fears the most out of all of this is the bastard killer’s stone-cold indifference as he violates those women.  _ Oh, this wouldn’t be the man’s first kill. _ The individual who couldn’t simply be reduced by the book like Hannibal or himself. A wolf wearing a believable mask of innocence behind the badge.

 

_ Understanding _ , had been one of the words he obstinately steered away from; all the recollections and the persistence of those strands that would turn into whips. thorns, vines wrapping around the vessel made of luscious layers of silk. With a gossamer-like brush of his tongue upon his lower lip, he presses on, the bite of the black widow immediately negates through the antidote of Hannibal’s presence through his head, his lingering scents and compelling touch, as if his own corporality would whirl away as he disintegrates.  

 

Remaining quiet, as the passing thought courses through and unspoken words seem to roll beneath his tongue. _ The professor _ , the names burn through his tissues, more so than the admission of love and the imprints of her hands on his cheeks. There was something about the way she said the name too; there had been a frozen fear, as her body still quivered like a leaf, but wickedly and strangely comforting as well. That made him to want to be her indestructible anchor, the last unbreakable lifeline that she could clutch to. If the Vergers had given her a sense of false security and ephemeral comfort, he would remove those viruses and reside in her body like white cells, boosting her immunity and being the white knight forever.  

 

“Sadly, I would have to leave Jasper to wrap things up, I have an important gathering to attend to,” Dr. Durand gathers all the photos of the gruesome atrocity and hands the thick stack to Jasper, then cants his head towards Nigel as he mouths the name Mayne. While his partner’s attention had been turned around to gather the briefcase on the adjacent table covered with dust and the particles of chipped splinters of wood and fragments of glittering shards, Nigel slips a photo of the girl’s remains inside his back pocket.

 

The saying comes true, _a smile is a curve that sets everything straight._ _As we all have those individuals, those hard to define ones; it could be one’s nemesis or a deceiver._ Their thickening absence both traumatizes and makes you stronger than ever. It is fucking inexpressible and never grows exhaustive. The earth will continue to spin, the flowers will continue to grow. He pauses, his unspoken, soft voice seem to merge one after another, like a lotus blooming in the midst of the most filthy backdrop, the purity and rebirth within her would be most beautiful.

 

_ Like witnessing a reincarnated phoenix soaring in the sky, with none of the detrimental metastasizing strands of thoughts flaming with each ember flume of the mythical creature.     _


	13. Chapter 13

_ Life will break him _ . Yet he won’t  _ break _ , lest he bends. Nobody can protect him from that as tenacious pricks turn into icy icicles. The air carries the usual scorching heat of the height of the afternoon and living alone in his headspace won’t do good either; for solitude will also break him with its yearning. You have to  _ love _ . You have to  _ feel _ .  _ It is the sole fucking reason he’s here on earth. _

 

_ You are here to risk your heart and shatter it in the process. You are here to be swallowed up and spat out. And when it happens that you are broken or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by the tranquil stream and listen to the ripples staccato all around you in heaps, wasting their latent and rudimental energy. Tell yourself you felt as many as you could. _

 

Trapped souls adversely affecting his luck as millions of shards from the mirror confirms his superstitions. Imposing and repellent, his outwardly crude manner is an expectant effect of the fortified  _ carapace _ , a defense mechanism of a person who was forced to grow up way too fast with all the insecurities manifesting into a coat of  _ insolence _ and  _ self-conceitedness _ .

 

Nigel wanted the others to  _ scrutinize _ and peel him back, yet no one ever dared to probe him further. The vulnerability stripping him raw, like a corn husk peeling off its layers. And all the hotness rushes like  _ exploding fireworks  _ affecting every inch of his skin and flaring nerves as blood gradually freezes over, shudder traversing through the curves and dips of his spine, through the distinctive line between his back muscles as the balance had been teetered and tinkered around.

 

The  _ rumble _ of his heart grows erratic like a piece of burnt up engine letting out noxious fumes. Body dipped in  _ molasses _ from head to toe, as he walks through a mud track, weighing him down further. With the professor and Jasper out of his view, he takes in the ravaged view where unfurled humanity seems to slide beneath his wavering grasp, as it taints, adulterates, coalesces with sins borne out of surrounding darkness and the dead silence of the quiet. The dimmed corridor entirely underwater as the distant whizz of the traffic becoming the  _ flickering _ light from afar grows more so haloed and hazy with each languid  _ blink _ . The whirling smoke pluck the thread gradually flay and weaken. He had never given a fuck about how low he could sink or how high he could float on cloud nine.

 

All the capriciousness of life; _it doesn’t matter,_ he would never die on his knees or surrender to _despair_ in the _absence_ of unperturbed sanctum. The shrieking screams turn into a _sonorous_ aria, from the peril and gruesome sight of _bones_ and _blood,_ yet it doesn’t change how he manifested himself upon the world. His aesthetic evolved into wretched gleam of _silver blade_ and columns of _compressed air_ pushing the cylindrical metal to be lodged upon the inner skull. Muddling and turning it into a pulp, the fleeting life futilely clutching upon with the swaying fingertips as the brewing anger and _gleaming_ _fury_ instills tangible warmth throbs with a kind of electricity, gathered inside every inch of his vein as sense of power begins to simmer as it sets itself deep within those _soulful_ eyes still remained bottomless and pensive. The stench still clings upon the thin weave of the fabric as he watches as the faint orange glow gradually seeping into the sky’s indian blue ink.

 

His reminder of this particular horrible day and the dissolving sky reminds him that there’s still beauty in the world no matter how much ugly and desolate the world seemed; as the bright color turns into sad flames licking up against the broken shards of glass. Without hands, feet, face, tongue, her shadows touching but never quite mingling. He tries to mouth something but they wordlessly slide away, outdone by whatever barrier was there.

 

How he wanted to believe the cloud-wrapped crescent moon had been watching over him, green orbs bright with intelligence and curiosity and amicable pleasantness. In reality, everything around him had been nothing more than a huge, desolate clump of shattered fragments, utterly  _ inert _ . He already had cried tears made of salt, blood, bones and their shared memories; what could’ve been such endless arias and serenades within his vein, as long as less frolic and staccato requiem. Now they coagulate and turns into sheets of ice and shatters into jagged fragments.

 

Jamming the bubbling sensation as he suppresses, as a wake up call from the mantras of the cold, past the impassive animosity that litters his existence as he treads, the supernova of his thoughts continuously clouds him in a funnel as he sinks into the obsidian, star-studded night.

 

Then, Nigel’s personal phone vibrates from his side, just under his loaded revolver.  _ Hannibal _ . In the midst of still figuring out who he is, it offers as an effective distraction, a tangible message to be deciphered instead of a poeticism, works in process.

 

“The party’s about to commence, where are you?” Hannibal still has about half an hour before he wraps up all the prepping with his sous-chefs and some of the more culinarily inclined guests of honor are giving him a helping hand in bringing the feast upon the dinner table. Rosettes formed out of the ingredients, not a trace out of the plate as his impeccably pushed back dark strands of hair. A throng of small gathering accumulates by the vast spaciousness of the table, both functioning as countertop and an elaborate dinner table. A lavender and other culinary herb align the garden by the portico and sways along the early evening air.

 

“Just left the fucking premise. I gather you got what you needed, or  _ who _ , for that matter,” beneath his huffing breath, Nigel paces with his usual swagger, before shutting off the hood and slamming the door shut. Pattering rain lashes against the windshield as soon as he steers the vehicle out of the street and as he speaks, other guests of honor slowly make their way back inside the well-decorated interior.

 

“You have twenty minutes to come home and change, I’d advise you to make haste,” with the piping bag in his hand, Hannibal’s lips faintly quirk up in a gentle curve before pouring his attention towards the raspberry cream, putting a dollop each on the dainty pastry before going over with the dark chocolate shaving and truffle. “I’d avoid the main road we usually take, there’s a holdup with a collision.” With Bach’s Variatio 6. Canone alla Seconda. a 1 Clav. playing in the background as he reminisces with nostalgic tenderness.

 

The sudden rush of afflatus propelling him forward as he wastes no single movement to bringing the feast of the life as his pectorals slowly rise and fall in his usual steady rhythm, but his gradually increasing heartbeat breaths with leverage with slight excitement. Head slightly thrown back as he appreciates the onslaught of permeating scents with rippling tunes that seem to accentuate each element of the fine dining with peak. His defined muscles moving effortlessly like a tuned instrument, Hannibal slips into a lulling pendulum of the extolment upon his body like no other; his spine straightened like a taut bow, the jawboning force of his movements at ease like gossamer silk makes him to want to sing a resounding aria. A satisfied hum echoes through the air.

 

“Fine,” as Nigel eases back to the back seat and through the slitted open window, he detects a familiar scent he had whiffed after Hannibal had dumped countless bottles of alcohol onto the floor to set the whole hole-in-the-wall bar down to the ground. He could literally smell the crackling flames, wildly spreading everywhere to consume everything. He associates this distinctiveness with such blind fury that transcends the sneaky dance of foliage mirroring sunlight beams. He doesn’t need to hypothesize the past to establish the same catalyst that would wipe the evidence clean; an unbearable truth. It would be much more efficient beneath such dry air as he intoxicates in the vaporizing smoke.

 

Hannibal’s uplifted gaze slowly lowers down to the sous-chef’s hand to scrutinize the final touches, and despite his renitent effort in his subconsciousness, he has to come to terms to accept the given help. At least his acquaintance’s behaviors weren’t unimpeachable so far and even through his rather stern and sangfroid demeanor had driven most of them away, His physical prowess slipped that layer down for him to remain scrupulous. At least, except truly and honestly accepting how much he needed a helping hand - hypocritically enough, perhaps he had been seeking one all along, that someone who could rely upon anything and everything.

 

A lump, growing into an unswallowable ball of fire just above his larynx, Nigel swallows visibly, as the flaring rush of salt pricks the back of his eyeballs. As if an onset of migraine was upon him, his rebellious heart protests. Defiant yet, a visible crack along his constantly hardened shell. Mended through his steely heart, which holds more bullets, more terrifying than those he conjures up from the depth of his imagination. He didn’t necessarily need one to concoct his own story, it was the damn real world.

 

_ Bewitched by the sinful torches, alongside with the desire brimming within his core. _

 

_ He was all hurting, with flaring temper, grieving, yet hopeful and jubilant. Loyal as one. Fighting, yet not amongst each other, but together, they’ll draft and edit the story.  _

 

“We are the most loyal companions of each other, strength born from brittle bones, soul flowing like a river, my fucking  _ oblivion _ and angel dust. Did you know that?” A long exhale, then a pause, “Do you  _ still _ smell the crushed petals, rotting bones with blood and coldness, incense and tears and every accumulation of those fucking things after all those years?” 

 

Nigel could feel the wavering grasp of the young woman’s image, slipping away beneath his hold as words emit without the filtration. Hannibal would be highly perceptive enough to gauge his words and penetrate through such poeticism. As they lose in the translation between the synapses of his nerves and his tastebuds, coarse and parched dry. The other sensations, as all the amalgamation becomes painfully tangible as soon as words mulls over his tinged lips, still clings onto his fleeting sanity with a strength born of desperation. He could feel the intermittent convulsions, turning more effortful and strained beneath his fingertips. His lips thinned, straightened as an imperceptible sigh constricts his chest, a sempiternal susurrus of fluttering heart. 

 

Having stood multitude of times behind the smooth trigger, Nigel very well perceives the resurgent feel of  _ powerfulness _ , the strange chill flaring all over his outstretched limb as he imagines the bullet churning through the professor’s inside like a clump of unquenchable fire. Of his eyes that had given out the indisputable order for the life to be extinguished. Such beastly empathy is a choice, his own unique capacity that would both inhabit the consciousness of another and suspend his ego. As if the inseverable connection had been achieved. With saddened orbs that reflect the faint moonlight behind such dissonance of downpour, the street lights wisps and bounces through the front of the vehicle.  

 

Hannibal’s intense gaze, now submerged beneath the dimmed light of the kitchen that seemingly continuously seeping even more darker shades by his steady heartbeat retracts further into his deep-ridged eye sockets. He didn’t have to further confirmation as words permanently had etched through the creases of his brain.

 

“I will let everyone go, but I will keep the one who I have accompanied. I want you back in five.” There is not even an ounce of regret, as Hannibal lets the lingering silence fill to the brim of his heart. His charge, the lost live parted from the ripe rosy air. A mausoleum of rotted autumn leaves. He had visited their twice, yet hadn’t gone back just yet.

 

A steady pummel of his chest continues to be fueled by the mere thought of him killing the one whom he had personally brought over. Of course, he had killed for numerous accounts and purposes as the extension of his body projected and stroke like a coiled viper would, or better, a kingsnake that would consume its own species.

 

Understated even when most fevered, enraptured by fiery maelstrom as Nigel sinks into that exquisite opiate, hopelessly and without an ounce of resistance. Carnal pleasures and all things destructive, an intense rush of chemicals without having to go through withdrawals. It was surreal, otherworldly and somewhat of a forbidden image, continues to etch as he imagines both of them stripped naked in spirits and bodies. as his fingers recollect his innate inclination towards  his breaths intermingling with the scent of metallic crimson, coalescing with his intense clash of aura. A beautifully terrifying and wretchedly enthralling thought.


	14. Chapter 14

Through Hannibal’s usual cruel and crooked mouth and exceptional nose of a well-bred canine, the way his brother smells even after being out all day still becomes an intoxication as he remains observant to his surroundings. It becomes the most scrumptious arsenal he has along with such ability as a former psychiatrist to slip into his and his twin’s stacked memories. His fingers, so eager to bend to whatever song is playing in his head and his broad chest, as it rises and falls and rises and falls on the counter that is reminiscent of autopsy table, drum against the plastered surfaces.

 

His finger to the board, his heart to the slatted adamantine cage, not going over a certain number of heartbeats. Through his smooth chin and pimpled politeness, his still chest drums as he perceives Nigel making his way in. His impeccably pushed back hair barely stirs. He doesn’t want to be able to run as his fingers through anyone too easily, yet he’s wanting that touch. None of his usual stomping bravado, whirling personal cologne becoming a hurricane as the empty corridors sink with unperturbed silence.

 

Of course, Hannibal knew Nigel’s penchant for getting into violence.  _ Nothing more, nothing less _ , the Lecter blood had been marinated with the innate concept. It wasn’t simply empty-handed with unfulfilled promises and a barren chest with nil. Even when they never contemplated over with their kills and had barely no remorse, yet he was entirely shackled with the subject of his sister. He could literally feel a strangled noise erupting from his throat and his vision turn inward where battle raged. So many times he had shed the silent tears and they had been acid, burning a continuous, overlapping paths on his cheeks. Bile and blood fills in his mouth. Salty, corrosive and also deceptively sweet.  

 

Nigel’s only rationale is for him to be an expendable in unending war, as an indispensable and irreplaceable being. He would pay his utmost allegiance to  _ her _ alone and shed more carnage than the adversaries who deemed him downright  _ bloodthirsty _ . Fingers poised like  _ scythes, _ his indistinguishable ember bear down in splitting, endless arterial spray splatters as screams of agony and the continuous stream of blood becomes a celebration.

 

The air seeps with such exotic, yet familiar viand as portions of ten, laid out on the countertop like a permanently molded model; inedible, with no music of the night to be turned up, blaring through the frolic heart and contented mind. There are only screams and disquietude of  _ crushed petals, rotting bones with blood and coldness, incense and tears _ .

 

Nigel stands opposite the table, with the air of burnt pyre and the symbol of coins in the grasp of his hands. The image facing downward, Hannibal wouldn’t need this extraneous world of noise become a cacophonous spillage as he remains ponderous, before he murmurs his own version of the very memory around this time of the year.

 

~~

_ He stands and looks out at the rain-swept trail by the manor and Mischa’s frolic steps crunch down against still sunbaked earth as the intermittent drops of rain streaks down his sharply protruding cheekbones. With an eye slightly slivered open as to catch her disappearing presence, the raindrop begins to drizzle. Not quite a downpour, but to maintain the world to be filled with the dazzling sparkles of diamonds and whispers of life. _

 

_ At the tender age of eight, it would have been difficult for anyone to not call Mischa a beauty; the curve of her neck is quite attractive and the look in her eyes is so open and friendly. With the edge of feisty adventurousness that balanced Hannibal’s penchant for domesticity and indoor activities and Nigel’s restlessness and uncontrollable-ness beyond measure. Wearing a light beige blouse, neat and uncreased and an air of smartness, there’s always a reasonable attraction towards curiosity, both to the nature and what Nigel does best - to scrutinize and hone his senses in the midst of onslaught of sensations to find her hidden clump like the most loyal guard dog.  _

 

_ Hannibal is shaded by lush overhanging leaves, gently swaying beneath the late summer wind. The air clings to his more dapperly dressed look, slightly moist with a faint hint of foliage peeking through from the distant valleys of the mountains. Nigel’s eyes glimmer briefly as his attention is deflected away from sticking his neck onto his brother’s drawings of the younger siblings towards the vehement trunk of the tree. His sleeves already damp because of his sweat. _

 

_ The colors of their world seep into the ambiance as each of their little presence drives with the immediacy of where their actions are directed; Mischa is the treasure they continuously seek out, the dazzling, vivid light upon a sun-shower which become a splendid jewel. Nigel’s vivid heart, in its etherealness and spellbinding quality, searches out that subtle charm that grows radiant by the streaked peaks of blue and orange. The gray lighted mist blends together such contrasting vibe, as if summer and fall had been still at an unending tug-of-war. With Hannibal’s commanding dextrous handling of the graphite, the strokes become the songs of the hummingbirds, catching the glimpses of the nature and two of the most treasured beings continue to sing and dance along.  _

_ ~~ _

 

If he ever could make out what this tear is, Hannibal would categorize this is one of the most saltiest, thus most emotional-ridden one that didn’t turn into acid. Instead of being a source of suffocation and poison, it was a breath of fresh air and Nigel’s particularly poignant and evocative recollection makes Hannibal’s dilated maroon to scald with both warmth and longing. He may comfort himself for knowing that this recollection awaits;  _ a constant reverberation that becomes his everything. _

 

“That’s the constant that continues to echo through my heart, beautifully spoken,” setting the piping bag down onto the table, Hannibal finally lifts his diverted gaze with a retraction of unspilled tears that means the world. When the contrasting orchestration conspires to keep them apart and keeping their hearts at bay.

 

_ Didn’t they prove they were worthy, that this was the love they deserved? _ It is precisely what it is, even when the world maniacally wielding an orchestra baton and watching them go.  _ How can one feel so full, yet so be empty? What can one do in the face of such exquisite suffering? _

 

This is kind of a memory that both of them cherish to their hearts, and fears that their innermost soul would become ever so empty, as the vignette of her imagery, which had been engraved to their hearts and minds would simply vanish one day. Their life’s apprenticeship where they labored through and got nothing to be paid in return, except to learn this massive absence of her presence as she flew away suddenly and the forest within them disintegrated slowly around them. They were forced to grow up and mature too fast as memories beget memories, turning worse than daggers and bullets.

 

“One can fill the void with what constitutes both the fucking pain and exquisite ecstasy.” Nigel is dazed, tangled in a pile of the strands of his memories. “Damn the fucking misty water-colored memories.”

 

_ And when does this promise become too fragile, as the tenacious memories become transient? Are there any signs that will tell them that a certain promise, the composed anthems on their skins become broken and nonexistent? _

 

Hannibal and Nigel’s deepest fear is not that they’re ever  _ inadequate _ ; it is that they are powerful beyond measure without the concept of Mischa haunting their dreams. They constantly ask themselves,  _ what if she had lived, she’d be such gorgeous, talented, powerful, riveting, charming, an epitome of aphrodite with both beauty and intellect. _

 

And Nigel would be Icarus. Even when the emptiness, the thought of erosion had kept him awake at night, the wings were held by the thrall of all three siblings’ frozen hearts, the relic of war that made their spirits to crash and tumble.  Everything was splendidly and frustratingly still and the only sensation he’s familiar with is his stomach surging into his throat as it continued to rise and sink as if he had been seasick.  _ Would he ever gain an insight to the inner workings of his brain, where it seemed have been soaked in abstract, as if it had been hidden beneath the glowing radiance of the sun and ominous clumps of clouds?  _ Those grand star-streaked sky wouldn’t able to offer him enough luminescence to reveal what had disintegrated slowly inside him.  _ Perhaps he really was floating lumps of carbon and stardust, without a pensieve to plunge and be lost into like a wanderer.  _

 

Though many more years had passed since then and corridors of their mansion had collapsed into memories within their shared dream, they are still lost to the sea of her presence. The scent of roses and linen, the suds inside the coppery bathtub, her luscious blonde locks with skin like gold sheen of life and blooming pink petals. The resilience and such docility of her, like a bird chirping to signal the change of the season. 


	15. Chapter 15

The sun refuses to give up the dominance to the star-studded night as the sky maintains its still orange glow, like that very sun Hannibal had captured on that day, along with the enormous pines that effectively hid Mischa’s petite frame, curled up as the shedding needles and stifling grasses had encompassed her. The silky air wafting through the lake, yawning as the rain finally passes, the cool chilled air becomes her voice as it metamorphoses from a sound of unconsciousness to a zealous and feverous joy of being alive on this beautiful day. As if Mischa’s extended arms had been the slanting ray and the dissipated ends had been her star-shaped hands, breaking through the bubbles of their breaths.

 

_ Such as that very day that will be a permanent shrine to their muscle memory, as blowing leaves, wilting petals, dying flowers, things that they associate and thus all reminiscent of her. _

 

Hannibal’s gaze sweeps down onto the gathered feast and he recalls the mass of flesh with a few organs; lungs that failed to do their jobs and hearts that has no soul and life.  _ Lost in concentration _ as his finger coats in fresh layer of blood, he revels in the sacred nature. He would bring the thin veil of wretched civilization, failing so readily away beneath his grasp. His  _ obsession _ , an  **addiction** .

 

“The breath of life, an account of a  _ saved _ life. She shall be responsible for all the held pages upon my memory palace and all the colorful memories, which seem to turn into  _ bruises _ .”

 

Sometimes living in a world that didn’t make sense had somehow made it felt like  _ home _ ; even when such moments like this that made his tongue so weak that it forgets what language to speak in. Lithuanian squeezes his heart to  _ hemorrhage _ , English seemingly lacks the minute nuances his native tongue couldn’t convey. All those years when he was hurting, Hannibal contemplates,  _ those nineteen years of Nigel’s absence had been like that. _ Through calmness, his emotions had raged through unsaid words and his form had been as fragile as chrysalis;  _ hoping to keep a new life to unfold. _ Now, he was even more so honest, raw and in love.  _ Benumbed by the memory, stimulated by the breath of poetry that had been forged in his brain. _

 

“The ugliest damned thing it could ever be. Being in love is like that, fucking terrifying.”

 

Nigel’s gaze lingers on the bountiful table, filled with fruits. Perhaps not the most suitable culinary creations to honor Mischa, the memories built with laughter and joy.  _ Such vibrations and elations _ . Yet, wasn’t this the means of their existence? Confront the demons of his memory, gouging them through his past and thus finding a kind of peace in the flesh.

 

Soon, those lips would dilute with a prospect of ravenous  _ hunger _ , as it  _ feeds on his soul. _ They are each other’s favorite  _ medicine _ and  _ drug _ , both the power to heal and ravage his insides, as the  _ indulgence _ and  _ temptation _ to devour become much greater. Delighting in the presence as more aggravating fissure wrecks his flesh whole, divulging further of his intent. Consumed with  _ scarlet _ , now with  _ taste _ .

 

Nigel could already visualize his greedy fingers clutch upon Hannibal’s impeccably pressed linen shirt.

 

_ And all of his non-speculative narrative about his own damned life becomes a journal within his mind, within a pool of his own blood,  along with Mischa’s warmth still coating the expanse of his skin. _

 

Even when he had been in the middle of the fucking pussy town, still caught up in the military industrial complex and working the hell with it at what he does best, Nigel, the fucking handsome rogue with lawless antics, with a heart of gold in his uncharacteristically selfless, damningly aching and soul-stirring way continues to burst and pulse.  _ Existing so far away from the stars _ .

 

Maybe more like a supernova in his fucking chest and he smiles one of his explosive smile, tinged with such sadness and loving beauty. Things he would do when the flaring tingle from the wounds stabs through his side becomes the mirage in the horizon. Through golden skin and fiery flesh, it’s ethereal and beautiful as the picturesque sky. Keeping it whole, until the colors evaporate and entwines with the darkness. Hannibal musters the same, a heartbroken one that oozes excessive longing. An endless calm he could drown into.  

 

With their hardened skin, caressed with layers of caked, rusty tang of blood. Such dichotomous memory had been their  _ rejuvenating _ potion, the  _ elixir _ to all the accumulated injuries they had sustained and the  _ source _ and fluttering  _ core _ of their burning fire, the sole reason of the Lecter blood’s creation.

 

With solemn devotion and  _ undying persistence,  _ Nigel’s body had littered with battle scars, contusions, gashes and stab wounds. Standing tall in the midst of another massacre; the  _ desecration _ upon the corpses, which had been tarnished with pink  _ viscera _ and stomach-retching fluids, pungent and toxic like ominous fog as the familiar puddle of black opal-like blood, pitch-black as his  _ tainted _ soul continues to widen its presence.

 

Once Hannibal’s conducive annihilation in his mind is done and over with, the paradoxical sun beats down upon his blood saturated locks, falling over those  _ trenchant _ orbs and still relatively impeccable behind the unforgiving maroon before receding. Retracted memories will regenerate, as myriads of scar tissues layered upon his battle-tested skin. Feeling the  _ irresistible _ force propelling him upward, more contempt unleashes as he feasts upon copious amount of blood. His  _ weapon _ , steady as a menacing smirk curve of his lips, he expects a barren and destitute world as this after  _ she _ is gone.

 

So in deafening silence, they quietly consume the food, now dedicated to her, their Mischa. The bones become her slatted ribs, the discord between what’s normal and accepted has become an inharmonious doctrine. Knowing the rack of lamb hadn’t been exactly that and the last remnant of the delicate dessert becomes the feel of her porcelain flesh and pink lips, dipped in a rose petal. Their shadows twirl around the room as more dark paints spill, slowly wrapping around their ankles.

 

Just like storing many photographs they had, memories become such a convergence. The laughable collision, the damaged, and the wreak. They continued to talk and savor, listening to their blood. They are craving for her, not only in the permanence of perceptible reality, but through their hearts as well. Through delicate exposure, it becomes instant unification.

 

~~

As almost full-moon barely takes a peek over the clumps of gray clouds, there Nigel lay on the vast stretch of mattress, surrounded by crisp white sheets. Naked and only surrounded by each other’s orbits,  such bliss of life that makes him want to sink his teeth on that flesh of his brother once again like he had with the sacrificial lamb, as he becomes a captive in the essence of him. No more such longing as the past memories transcribe itself into the brilliant sound of the spark as the radiant moonlight ignites and spreads - he has no desire to pluck away from that as he sprawl onto what it used to be freshly pressed sheets, now dancing with melodic whispers. Just like how they had been from the womb _. _

 

_ To their contented heart’s longevity - until the end of time, until their phoenix feathers and ashes resurrect upon the world unhinged and their bartered souls liberated.   _

 

To both of them, snow always had been a symbol of purity, that  _ innocence _ and unblemished thing that they associated with tranquility, beauty and all things good and almost sacred. For Hannibal, the immediate association had been linked with unforgiving, relentless death and hardships the twins had endured through the course of nature. It had been a contrasting case now that it merely symbolized desolate  _ bleakness _ , like the gray walls closing in, alongside with the encasing snowdrift looking more like a vindictive light as each crystal turned into a jagged shards. He could feel the gleaming light withdraw from his intense maroon, growing lackluster as his curled fingers tighten around the sheets.

 

Rest had evaded him until now as he had been wrapped in  _ paradoxical _ contrition; in Hannibal’s dream, swirling flakes become thick impastoed strokes, hurtling and dancing across the tumultuous air. He had scented a distinctive scent of a white rose, with thick stem and numerous thorns even when there hadn’t been a live flower at sight. It doesn’t blossom so vivaciously like other flowers do as if those delicate petals had been shaped with clay. The saddest truth is that as soon as it shows a hint of lingering lavishness, the bundle of resilience ignites and flame flares, the smoke exude such overpowering recollection of memories that’s so predominant and dominating that he would encompass and take over. The tangible, strong flower seem to flake, refused of the exquisite sun that would instill a beauty that doesn’t fester and rot away.

 

Understated even in his most fevered  _ high point _ of emotions, his mind whirls a hurricane. with too much anger, sadness and explosive power. He would explode too often as he wasn’t free from the lulling combination that could only be agglomerated into nostalgia with yearning bittersweetness of their shared memories. The unspoken questions unfurls in his head and mostly, they’re ‘ _ what could’ve had beens _ ,’ if she was alive and physically with them as a complete unification. The silent  _ fluctuation _ had warmed him through the rippling motions, along with the scalding heat pushing through the back of his eyes, accentuating his exhaustiveness. It would get worse until it doesn’t; until the charred edges widened along with the gaping hole in his chest. His own straightened composure would sway like a flickering light upon the obsidian darkness. Almost entirely filled with void as he lets one word linger against his still warm lips. In hushed tones as he regards the world with half-shut gaze, his drawn, deep ridges of his eyebrows pinch slowly, as he suppresses the scalding embers behind the diaphanous orbs. “Mischa,” a visible and audible swallow as her name sounds so foreign and distanced. Her name becomes the forbidden requiem itself, as it signified the inhumanity of human beings and it burns and encompasses his fundamental nature to be inclined with equal violence and aggression. “Show me where  _ she’s _ buried.”

 

_ Was he speaking to himself, or was he speaking to Mischa’s apparition? _ Hannibal doesn’t have to visualize too hard to see such animosity as he had seen them all in the past; scattered remnants of tender bones, broken and shattered as molecules dipped in carbon and dust. Icarus slain even before given the chance to soar towards the sky. Even when his whole world had been crumbling apart through his pricking eyes, shrinking heart and constricting lungs, he would sought to help Mischa’s wings to take her own flight, even when he knows when he’s fighting a losing battle as the wretched memory conquered over his existence.

 

He looks at himself before diverting his gaze towards the growing flame, then draws an arch towards the wavering hint of smoke, the fallen ash beneath his feet, his pulsing heart screaming that it was his own fault. His own slanting shadow looking smaller than ever as he scrutinizes every discernible edge of it. Life and death wasn’t such a clear-cut white and black. He encompassed all the fifty shades of gray, all the  _ excessive _ muddy tones that left his monochromatic world to deluge with crimson discharge of his own. This was his whirling dance on the ashes of his past, his  _ resurgence _ . And just like alcohol and drug, it would be  _ devastatingly _ painful after they leave, the withdrawal would ravage through his body within each inch of his veins and skin, as he crumbles and flakes. Like a wax doll left open in the scorchers; his form neglected, particles slivering off and finally, melting beyond reparation.

 

Hannibal’s pectorals slowly rise and fall in his usual steady rhythm without nothing having thrown off, but his gradually increasing heartbeat breaths with leverage. Head thrown back against the pillow as his defined muscles string up taut like tuned instrument, he slips into what it began as a lulling slumber of the extolment upon his body like no other; his spine arched like a bow, the nightmare’s jawboning force makes him to want to sing a resounding aria, then it takes a quick, dramatic turn as the haunting memories of her worms its way through a weak point in him. It latches itself through his nerves, shakes them and jerks his muscles. Ceaseless frenzy continues as he’s wrapped in paradoxical contrition; like a concept of  _ rose _ , with thick stem and prickles. He doesn’t glow or flutter like other flowers do, yet the saddest truth is that he  _ blazes _ and  _ flares _ with the flame, his petals exude such scent that’s so  _ predominant _ and  _ dominating _ that he would encompass and take over.

 

Eyes, clamped shut, still hold the lingering incoherent image of Mischa like a  _ shrine _ . Hannibal realizes, he didn’t even hold a proper funeral for her. In all, her soul had taken a part of him, as all whom he had consumed so far resided within him. He is the finest  _ warrior _ , yet it hurts so much to  _ breathe _ . This kind of memory sticks to his bone marrows, never fading away as it accumulates into the carbon and dust which comprises himself. He’d be forever buried in the legacy she left behind as he bathes in her exquisite, yet fleeting scent. The aubergine rose petals become dripping blood and the animosity he had faced with his first ever kill seem to make its presence.

 

Her  _ beauty _ and its unmatched  _ elegance _ . Hannibal finally sees a woman, slender and slim, blooming with pride as Lecter blood meant an apt intuition and exceptional knowledge. With charming smile and alluring magnificence. The inner rose becomes a gorgeous flower that no one would dare resist. The fire’s red edge itself becomes those blossoming petals and charred firewood becomes the rough, rigid edges of the stem. He doesn’t even dare say out her name, as if that beauty would whirl away from his grasp. It is meant to stay, to leave a sempiternal impression upon both of them.

 

With clenched fist and his spine locked in a teetering paroxysm of unconscious and conscious, and before the boundaries become  _ coalesced _ , the place he almost remembered now becomes utterly  _ lost _ , the corner of Hannibal’s eyes clamp tighter, as tearing screams shred his throat, as the dream ravages through him. Just like as it had in the orphanage, where his skin and lungs burned to eat themselves once again. 


	16. Chapter 16

Both madness and sense of limerence had completely bewitched him, yet Hannibal doesn’t have such a recollection when threading consciousness finally emerges, though briefly. It thrives on his discomfort and his restrained shaking is trivial. Until his own flesh is splayed in half as his body begins to _malfunction_ ; letting his weakness leech his energy, as he aches within the voice that had been silenced ephemerally by time and separation. It’s all the same and filled with recurrent imagery of brittle bones, ravaged flesh and loathsome putridity. _His galaxy and soul they can’t touch. The place he will never reach._

 

The universe and his own corporeality seem to compress and expand almost concurrently; his core squeezes, the marrow oozes with such amalgamations of condensed emotions he wouldn’t dare even conjure in his native Lithuanian tongue nor the English language to make a more meaningful statement than this, but honestly he couldn’t bring himself to find anything that resonates as deeply as one; _he is never going to be awake at night as he lays so fully animated, but nevertheless,_ _helpless_. The city still manifests such illuminating brilliance through the crevices of the cold, hard floor and rose-colored terracotta walls. Maybe there would be little miracles, but it could be unanimously concluded that his mortality would be ceased indefinitely to fully relieve the experience once again. Still, there would be a lingering hope, as words fail him to believe in that reason to believe in _better days_.

 

He feels like he’s still locked in a pensive in a hallucination. _Serene, ethereal_ , yet the unfamiliarity of his own oblivion seems like he’s forever locked in an uncharted territory. Nothing tangible to grasp as the empty spaces of his cranium continues to leak crimson discharge. Like trees shedding leaves. Even when they were turning into crumbled leaves in the palms of the world, they simply refused to disintegrate, down to the state where they couldn’t be fixed. It was contagious, like two chemicals mingling to elicit such a reaction that would drown the whole world with a booming explosion. All incessant prickling, skin peeling as tissues pour out of the charred projectile. _Raw flesh,_ his bare body locked in an empty stare, still full of fervent flame. The fluttering edges of the embers flitter in dense air, along with his trapped soul, resistant to leave the vessel.

 

Then, words become the most woeful tragic tower of Babel; incoherent languages, his ragged edges and all-consuming flame engulfing the fragile structure built upon his insecurities and vulnerability. How one moment, no one becomes his anything and he’s bombarded and had plummeted headfirst into someone, as somebody becomes his everything. _Mischa_ , because he had projected so many things happening with one of the loves of his life.

 

A deep, muffled groan, stifled by Hannibal’s clenched teeth, fails to escape as if his lungs had been squeezed out of air, filled with crystallized granules, balling up inside him to weigh him down. The ornate flamboyant colors of the canopy bed whirl like warm spectacle of precious jewels. A disapproving pugnacity manifests in the form of an _ear-splitting percussion,_ as also presented within his hardened features. Hannibal didn’t fear anything _tangible_ , he would go to the ends of the earth in order to overcome what he could feel it with his tactile touch.

 

Through the lingering remnants of her imagery, a serpentine, yet assuring and determined arm loops around Hannibal’s pectoral, as his lips twitch with lingering sense of dread that never fails to thrust into him like a punch in his gut. Then soon follows a lengthy drawl of exhale, mirroring Nigel’s usual sauntering stride sweeps against Hannibal’s broad shoulders. And just like he had so many times, the movement itself becomes such vivid memory of habiture, as he had countlessly taken on a role of a nurturer to silence faults within their skies. As they had shared an unexpected death bed upon the living; the burden would be carried onto them as they had trudged through the life and they would have to live through what was unfinished. As he held his brother’s hand in his yet again, _how they perfectly fit as they find snippets of their lost home within the mapped coordinates of their flesh._

 

Through the world so quiet, yet the latent energy of Nigel’s thrum never shuts up as the love illumination sparks, etching through the darkness as Hannibal cracks through consciousness in a paroxysmal euphoria. The lingering hint of scream clinging like bristled hair against his throat. Now it becomes more like a silent acoustic pluck of the guitar. His torn apart inside stirs, wakes and mends with slow trudging of outstretched coordinates.

 

Silence, perturbed yet gradually slipping into tranquility, lengthens further as the white fibers stained with blood and watery discharge peels back from the back of Hannibal’s eyes. The dream had been always the same, as if Mischa’s soul had been lingering all along, fluttering close like some kind of a bird. Had it not been his retaliation as he watched the twinkle-less eyes fading into the darkness and screams rang off the trees like patchworks. Just like how their hands become so intricate, with carved wrinkles as they had mapped out the universe in their palms. _Calamitous and nurturing._

 

“Do you feel her in your throbbing veins? Squeeze of your fucking heart? She’ll continue to be our _infinite constant,_ just like you and I.”

 

Pulsating nerves, the lingering emptiness metamorphosed into the crushing breaths as the world translates like the fantastical realm Hannibal had been creating. _Love hurts, the world spirals down into the vortex of void. Just like how he had endured Mischa’s death and loss of his twin, then series of roller coasters upon their tumultuous life. They touched each other souls so deeply that they left smudges of fingerprints, in too deep._ His guarded _vulnerability_ and the _emptiness_ frays and splinters and they become flickering dazzle of the celestial bodies. Yet, he contained too much _zeal_ , unreleased energy yearning to be unleashed as strokes become _limerence_ and _memories_ . _A fault and a virtue, really._

 

“She has touched me and I have become what I’ve become,” drenched in sweat with lassitude claiming his eyelids, Hannibal’s eyes open in a sliver as the blurred world somersaults to greet him. “A thorny rose I can’t resist to touch, the gossamer beauty in its enchanting dangerousness.” With a laced shards of snowflakes, both jagged, pricking his fingers and caressing him with frigidness. Never to fill the trenches of his chasmic void.

 

Besides the association which winter brings and never-ending increase of perspective as Hannibal’s blurred view entirely fills with swirling flakes becoming thick impastoes, dancing across the tumultuous air as it had been through foggy windows of Lecter castle, as the slanting evening sun barely penetrate through the clumps of gray clouds. Once a real world, instead of being the subject of chased dream with a passion. One can dream, one can imagine, but it would never materialize into a reality as the nature’s glaring error had sought to remedy that nil.

 

“Damned fucking love, it’s everything our beloved has ever been and all she ever will be. In every fucking heart, there is a dream and we sing a requiem through subconsciousness, and in every song, there’s Mischa.”

 

Both madness and sense of limerence had completely bewitched Nigel, yet he doesn’t have such a recollection when threading consciousness finally emerges, though briefly. His mind had refused to be in tranquility before he had plunged into a deep sleep. The strong curve of his back undulated along, as it mimicked the serene, unperturbed sea over the cliff, where their residence perch. In near darkness, his naked torso reflects the contouring light, the slow, almost imperceptible ebb and flow of his ribs signifying the life it contained.

 

“A common denominator within the splash of cold. The primordial ooze of the pyre which she deserves. I failed to put those coins over her eyes, I’d worship the ashes of her laid, burned form.” Words become toast to this particularly chilled night, as the numbness stays numb. The fire only adds onto the atmosphere and fails to warm their bones.

 

Low and murmuring, rising through the moist air as it takes on an affectionate tone. Seeking to mollify the other and when the other voice rose in turn as Nigel’s smoky, sleep-ridden voice whispers close, both guarding and guiding. Hannibal slides effortlessly into sleep again as though falling into a sudden abyss; as memories beget memories. That anchoring pale light seeping through wisps of grey clouds, the countless times how Hannibal had slipped into that breath-soft slip of deep slumber when the thoughts of powerlessness consumed him like ghastly tattoos. The ambiance becoming less and less able to distinguish between the intermingled limbs and the sounds of their exchanged breaths, Hannibal’s own turning from frantic jets to shared sighs.

 

Perhaps they were the materialized, vindictive spirits carrying forth and egging on the Lecter blood’s intrinsic violent nature. The eyes that held the final image of her, tears falling through the porcelain skin of hers, the ears which he heard the voices of her unperturbed pureness, calling his and his twin’s name. Lastly, Hannibal’s own quivering lips uttering the name which had been only ricocheting off his inner skull. “ _Mischa_ ,” tears become fuse, burning, charring with raw edges.  

 

Hannibal’s solid frame leans against Nigel’s front with an even measure of his breaths, yet the visible sign of distress is evident through the bland expression. Fingers clutch against a thin maroon blanket, reflecting his own vehement and sorrowful gaze. The snow manifests itself into unbearable reins upon his heart and lashes until it thrums with such force. Torrential blood, as if from a huge beast, floods upon the unperturbed and such immaculate snowdrift and as time wears on against his reverie, it all becomes bones and sinew. _Who said nature is kind?_ It doesn’t forgive and it never will.

 

“The beloved, she’ll become the most levitating dream and a sweet serenade,” still, he’s frightened, such uncharacteristic emotion that seemed all too foreign. He fears their memories with her, her presence would fast and fade away. “She’ll echo through the space of our hearts.” Hannibal’s words break the lengthening silence, on the pendulum between consciousness and slumber.

 

Hopelessness and abandonment which followed soon after, and returning his own distressing emotion with impending danger and pain still weighed heavily upon his heart like a sinking anchor. None of the things were easy to admit, he was too stubborn and showing signs of weakness didn’t exactly translate to being strong at all. However, being a creature of emotion meant that he was indeed enslaved by it. It was out of his control.

 

The fire within Hannibal’s stomach grows, as he lastly worships the ashes of what laid burnt. Serving him both side of the same coin and it always had followed with some kind of somatic incapacitation. _No more burning up, seeing Mischa in his recurrent dreams and literally melt into a puddle of sweat and tears._ The things he had stubbornly pushed away back within the unreachable niche of his psyche haunting him like a lively apparition. Through his almost ghostly pallid face with sunken orbs, Hannibal looks at his reflection through Nigel’s flame-tinged facade and lets out an inaudible sigh, a hot column of air whirling out like something from a foghorn. Nigel’s strong arm grounds him down as he feels his twin’s breath against the crook of his neck.

 

“The very fucking face of love, she would become our anthem.”  

 

With Nigel’s words pressing through the sides of his head, Hannibal’s lionhearted corporeality slips once again into the sound of pulsating music, the whisper of gossamer moist air of the home they had made as he wistfully stare into the night sky before consciousness slowly passes.


	17. Chapter 17

_It is no fun writing about perfections. I want to talk about you. Flawed. Crooked. Endlessly fascinating._

 

They’re like _Messier 83_ , one of the most _conspicuous_ galaxies in our skies with a _phenomenon_ known as a double nucleus; a _single supermassive black hole_ ringed by a lopsided disc of stars, which orbits around the black hole and creates the appearance of a dual core. Identically different, yet utterly same with shared DNA, with the same fire and gold and vast forest in their eyes. The embered coal still ignites through the exhaustive emotions as bundles of electrical charges flare and the merging fine lines roll up and surges into a series of _discharge_ and sky bleeds red as their stories unfold.

 

Within the world full of frigid gray, melancholic prussian blues, towers of ice and splintered icicles, they were the _catalyst of fire;_ the idyllic setting unfolded like a world full of red ochres and a world full of possibilities. Those were altered, distorted and faded as the distinct boundaries muddled and blurred; the ugly pastiche of Nigel’s lurid, maverick unfurling, alongside with Hannibal’s careful, calculated telos of lon-linearity. And the undetachable association of his injuries and scars, as their movements become the ocean tides, rising and falling around each other’s corporeality.

 

Mischa had been the construction of atomic proportions in their minds, as she would forever make them to bleed an ocean of their sanity, maxims of his uncharacteristic obsequiousness. As her presence had crawled in such a slow manner, but they lingered as they seeped into their souls. Life was always messy and broken; pieced together with haphazard moments of pain and joy and Nigel’s embodying his twin, taking his manifestation over with their shared blood in his mouth as wretched nightmares and painful memories cast away with each breath. The bubbling fire seems endless and non-tiring, as it dries every inch of his vein to mimic the fissuring crack upon sun-dried earth.

 

Nigel’s form, already having rolled within sun-sustained clouds and as if he had been reactive against the retained sunrays like threaded weave of the tapestry, presses firm without any perturbation. His entirety would ache as bright as the afternoon sun as the lingering imperative continues to _agglomerate_. The sound of their pressed hearts lulling into deeper sleep in their silent conversation, scattering and looping through their skeletons. It pours over him, shining with sincerity and curls over the instrument of his limbs, like a flower bending in the wind. It tickles along the web of his fingers and plastered chest, all the way through the fine hairs on his forearms.

 

They could already feel their chaos, soaked with crimson already sucked onto their skin. Where the hunter becomes the hunted, and vice versa, and they can wear those veils effortlessly even when they had traipsed without each other’s presence. _Pain and suffering are always inevitable and remains inseparable,_ the thin line between being gentle, effacing caress to becoming so rough, scratching itself raw as the real escape is near. Fingers turn turmoil dances of the violin string, the most levitating and sweet serenade upon the constructed notes as Nigel’s chest stills, awaiting that moment of thrill before he plunges into the leap off from the cliff. And in synchronization as their trudging matches; though the memories could be relentlessly tormenting and they keep coming again and again, unavoidable as it could kill them slowly. _Didn’t they already lose their minds like real mad men and feelings had been governed by the longing cuts in their cores?_ The invisible strings stretch and sever one by one as what seemed to be slowly eating away their flesh now becomes whiskey dreams, as they intoxicate and become lost upon their swimming scents.

 

As the warmth transpires into something entirely else as the rising sun seeps the sweet solace, pouring upon their hearts, each blossoming drop becomes _kaleidoscope_ of multiple reds and oranges. None of the _jagged slivers_ and _splinters_ , malleable bones, as they transpire into such an emotional turmoil. Every breath, brush of their skin becomes the electricity pumping through them and they feel the sparks pulsating through their bones as if bellowing their existence out. Their heart’s content lies coordinates, and even after exploring them so many times in whole, there still are uncharted territories to be claimed.

 

Hannibal’s eyes slip open from dreamless airplane, as he just lands upon their sanctuary, safely tucked beneath Nigel’s touch. _Just like vodka; eliciting hangover, burning his throat as he had blacked out with a blank stare._ Sweet and rich like caramel, steady and intoxicating like drops of honey. Hannibal’s view remains to be multitudes of fluttering shadows and lights, as he still plummets into a sea where piercing light rays were replaced by rippling movements. So ethereal and tempting like treading stars on the vast studded sky. Electric currents become luminous glow in his veins as Nigel’s slightest movement threaten to cut the fuse to a ticking time bomb.

 

Their entangled limbs, rumpled sheets and colors looking more like expanding bubble beneath the misted ocean as it dances through his filmy, tanned skin. The space between them narrows even further as the pause between rhythmic, whispering zephyr punctuates with Hannibal’s steady pulse, against Nigel’s slightly increased one. Hannibal’s sitting in front of that very ocean, the daybreak as still as the muted night of the Mediterranean as the beach still maintains to be fast asleep with silent, steady breaths. Faced with coeur to coeur, Hannibal’s fingertip graze over his twin’s pulse, as if trying to decipher the wildness in his eyes through the sleeping doppelganger’s reflection, to anticipate his actions. Such unpredictability makes Hannibal’s veins sing, as he had gotten used to Nigel’s antics and he temporarily recalls the time when Nigel had fetched his waterlogged sketch of the younger twin, engulfed in the vignette of sunset over Luxembourg Garden, his darkened silhouette encompassed with cigarette smoke and faint zephyr of chanson d’amour becoming wafting constellations upon his sketching fingertips. A smear upon Nigel’s high cheekbone.

 

It’s a perpetual hysteria full of burnt snapshots of memories, floating upon the air and dissipating like suspended dusts. Each deconstructed lines, both barely grazing the surface of the paper and self-assuring and decisive as a determined line dividing the dimension from 2D to 3D, Hannibal’s lips become like a halcyon of agglomerating fire, the intensifying sunrise over the clouds as they burn through Nigel’s lips, necks and cheeks. _Mischa’s, Nigel’s_ , becoming withering petals as their form whorls between the web of his fingers. Where three souls collide to fill in the emotional void, the creation of desire through their connection. _The feeling of fragility, like having a raw, ruptured nerve that threatens to leave stretch marks upon his heart._ All the plethora of epinephrine and distress, feverishly convulsing muscles after, another day draws back behind slowly fluttering eyelids. The golden illumination so sweet like nectarine, blissfully beautiful and painstakingly languid also.

 

After letting his full lips become the instrument to elicit such gossamer sketch upon Nigel’s sun-kissed skin, a feather-light touch is placed over Nigel’s pulse over the base of his neck. Such amaranthine exquisiteness to delve into as Hannibal’s fingers dawdle; the strong silhouette of his twin against the backdrop slowly wavers as his lips imprint more hearts along the strong curve of the neck and slowly bobbing adam’s apple…

 

Still wearing his usual sleepy, slightly confused look, Nigel’s lips had parted to taste the stimulation from his core forming in an essence through Hannibal’s fingers. The right side of his upper lip quirks up in a serpentine arch. The quantifying comprehensibility to the inner workings of his twin’s mind unfurling in the stretch of infinity. Such silence akin to the immeasurable depth of the ocean seems all in his head, yet _dichotomically_ , it feels so real as a radiant gleam of gold contour brushes against their plush skin. Their desire and pleasure becoming the heat prickling down the back of his neck. The shared warmth immediately fills the space of their canopy bed, much more intense than the peeking sun over the distant horizon. Spark flares and it barely takes a heartbeat for Nigel to dive in as tingling sensation, the laughter of the muscles echo through the synapses and he wonders if he would be more of a slave within the hidden space of gravitational pull, countable by only themselves.

 

Like a _rolling thunder,_ Nigel advances. Along with Hannibal’s own craving fingers that sought his younger twin as his corporeality had turned into the blanket around him all night. Hannibal’s own sternum draws back, like a pulling tidal wave, as the steady, yet increasing reverberation ululates against the cavern of his throat. Hannibal’s equally possessive motion draws _lengthy_ and _intense_ before the obscurity metamorphoses into a tripping euphoria. Where the edge begins and smears, like charcoal dust. Almost gone, yet forever _marked_. The jubilancy of their thrumming hearts turning well-tuned instruments. Giving each other the benefit of the doubt as a single reminder of their ephemeral joy, now gradually roughens to jostling wilderness, increased to materialize and glow as coals in a bonfire.

 

Crimson lips dilute with a prospect of hunger, as it _feeds on his soul._ They’re each other’s favorite _medicine_ and _drug_ , both the power to heal and ravage their insides, as the _indulgence_ and _temptation_ to devour become much greater. Delighting in the presence as more aggravating fissure wrecks their flesh whole, divulging further of double intent. Consumed with _scarlet_ , now with _taste_ , Nigel’s greedy fingers clutch upon Hannibal’s defined biceps, coiled into a knot.


	18. Chapter 18

An absolute, incomprehensible attraction continues through the dazzling radiance, which begins to unfurl in front of him like a tapestry, spilled forth like a waterfall. As the expanse of their skin ripples like sparkling stars like diamonds along the clear night sky, scattered through the quenching stream of early evening as a crimson yarn pools, Nigel’s form encompasses Hannibal’s whole. His arched back sinks so that his mouth could latch onto the very pulse where Hannibal’s lips flutter away like butterfly’s wings and the dawning excitement shines upon, with the promise that what they’ve ever hoped for unfurls.

 

For he’s the supernova tucked into a soldered carapace of a time-tested armor, with eyes that make anyone question the _transparency_ of his soul. Nigel’s not the traditional masterpiece that is made up with intricate layers in-between, yet he is the _impastoed_ conglomerated strokes that live rather _tumultuously_ as the pigments continue to be malleable and unpredictable beneath the _solidity_ and _vehemency_ of the surface. His lucid emotions akin to dipsomaniac euphoria plays at large here, for he’s about to plummet beneath a _volatile whirlpool_ of mixed emotions and such _familiarity_ , the quiddity, the pained quaintness of this striking reality makes his nerve endings sing and upturns his stomach. The drowning white noise turns an endless _climactic_ buildup, and works even more so potently than the cloudy mystic whirl of obscurity. The long-forgotten sensation of bombarding blazing halos and radioactive stream of technicolor he would face as an old company when he sought less _pleasurable_ recollection.

 

The time warps and the evanescence manifests, yet they transform into such _incorrigible_ intensity as a hint of burning desire flashes upon the unblinking hazel. No amount of fictitious display of affection given by passing individuals would elicit such candor rawness. Nigel’s heart throbs with something other than the bitter chill that had accompanied him for so long in the association with sempiternal pain, he relishes the genuineness of the ebb and flow; the foamy azure ocean water kissing over the impeccable shores as his body moves conducive to Hannibal’s movements.

 

The slightest purse of his lips hide the fact that his very own length surges in vivacious vigor beneath the slightly creased skin, painted with rolling thunder as lightning streaks thrum beneath the awakened vessel and veins. The generated heat, what it used to serve as a corroding agent now transforms to a _congenial_ memento of the past, very much so corporeal and real now. Hannibal’s observant, all-encompassing gaze is the kind that sweeps and scrawls into his mental note.

 

 _Another new day_ , the dream which had cast a gloomy, yearning spell all over the lands of vividity and ensorcelling exoticism now shakes silhouettes of shades of gold and blue. It’s as if building a complex palate and developing it, combining all the highlighted elements to find the impeccable balance. If Nigel was a star ingredient that would dominate the plate by captivating the surface and other notes on the creation, Hannibal would be the masterchef, executing that gentle energy within his brother with his fingertips as if he had been searching for that perfect note. How much they had struggled to find that comfort and ease as they meet in the middle. Words float by their flesh, brushing in electrical charges as fingers latch tightly. Reality sets in like bubbling hot water and his mind is a stirred mess, a jumble of incoherent thoughts. Hannibal doesn’t want to subjugate, yet the morning would continually wear on, the hubbub of his heart, breathless exhales and sweaty skin would soon drift away.

 

“You remind me of sea urchins, _spherical, spiny_ , its stings could be severely poisonous, yet the roe themselves are one of the most sought after delicacies in many parts of the world, ” Hannibal declares as in his mind, he’s preparing the ingredients through the blank space full of dizzying, sinking starlights as his movement readies to burst out, as his core seemed to ignite a flame as his chin dips, unblinking eyelids slowly shutting off such perceivant sense as he solemnly focuses on glowing scent and stimuli of his brother. Nigel’s hair is already sticking off in every direction beneath Hannibal’s fingers, which become fading lines; raking and curling through his long gossamer of ash blonde veil as overhead bright light illuminates through the curve of their bodies, merely parted a sliver away from each other. Slurping and watching the coppery skin swell with blood right beneath it, Nigel shoots an irritated gaze and clamps his teeth harder against the strong curve of his twin’s neck.

 

“I prefer them raw with tangy sauce. Wouldn’t want to do too much with its natural, potent flavor. How it remains inside me, all around, wrapped in otherworldly haze as liquid runs through my delectable palate, yet…,” an intended pause. “I’d like to dive into your waters again and again.”

 

The continuous gossip between their pressed body sings with renewed unification as Hannibal’s thumb contours through Nigel’s side; featherlight strokes, defining his sensual curves. Starting with his  handsome and broad forehead, trailing beneath his slightly damp locks. His body breathes syllables of soft moans and pants, gradually growing breathless as chambers of his heart frantically tries to match the pulsating reverberations within his cranium.

 

“If that’s your fucking way of wanting to be suspended beneath the roughness to feel your entire fucking galaxy spin in breaths and gest, then I should oblige.”

 

Overarching, aching as his tangled mind whispers a labyrinth of his mind. So many times they had been slaves to such taxing recollections of memories. Silence might fool and deceive him now, but his hazel, mimicking the sunrise from the daybreak as they encompass and in utmost revel of his twin’s naked form, contours through him. As if he had been the master carpenter chipping away that little chipped piece of marvel to bring their rippling skin beneath his roughened palm.

 

Electric pulses flare, through his ajar lips, the lingering taste of her continues to send him over the edge of delirium. Even after his form had sunk beneath her in high tide of torpidity. Her smaller form perches atop of him and she spreads her wings like an eaglet taking her first flight. He feels as if he’d been on a red-eye flight, as his corporeality seeps scarlet red with his resounding heat, agglomerated by her adhered flesh. His fingers are purposeful, yet idle; drawing an incomprehensible pattern along her arched back as she presses against him more. Drawing an upward movement as his fingers rake through the damp locks, pushing away the plastered ones over her cheeks, he would surge upon her lips with intent, without any hesitation. Lips immediately part and seeks closure, as the voice upon him rings with such love. _You’re my personal, such unexpectant sunbeam drenching the darkest corners of my mind and tenderize my inflictions into something entirely else._

 

Fingers firmly dif into Hannibal’s hips and Nigel rolls like a striking whip upon the base of Hannibal’s neck as his blood, drawing ribbons upon his gaze and onto the _cerulean_ expanse of the canopy tent over the bed. Shutting off the whole world as he _burned out._ Breath was scalding hot against Hannibal’s neck as his own curve around the sharp line of Nigel’s ass, slapping and drawing closer to the warmth. Teeth latch around viciously, brimming with significance as the senses unfurl. Hannibal’s deep-set maroon flutters close with an imperceptible gasp, a sharp draw of breath through his nostrils as Nigel’s distinctive muskiness splits through equally potent scent of the Mediterranean salty breeze. He could still see that boyish glint, that lethal deviousness exuding off of the brash sprinkle of brilliance, still etched upon Nigel’s lips.

 

A black hole turns into a supernova; with newly mustered fanaticism, Nigel’s firm biceps close around Hannibal’s inner thigh in a frantic rush as his tongue latches seeks closure around Hannibal’s entrance, pressing moist and eager against the tight ring of flesh. Hannibal could feel the slightest contraction, so initiative and without a single doubt. With entire flat side of his tongue, he begins to stretch as if collapsing into the unfathomable well and gets rewarded with a slight shift of legs, an exhaled sigh and a squeeze upon his narrow back. Decisive and confident, Nigel’s stroke become even more so demanding, fully devoted to the given task as Hannibal’s hips rock back only a fraction of inch as his toes curl, hard muscles pressing against Nigel’s shoulders.

 

Straddling onto Nigel’s hard muscles above his quivering ones, Hannibal lets his eyes lulled close while gazing at the sky for a while, recalling lilac and sweet, swimming with sunshine like early spring morning daffodils. He could feel the dust cover his winding digits as the unimaginable heat permeates into the ambience as a great tide of his uncontrollable pleasure rushes along with a succession of involuntary, yet almost inaudible gasps.

 

More often he had wished he could fade away like a whirling smoke. His veins sung a dream of freedom. Not even the _daybreak_ , being a shackled slave to such raw and carnal act of watching his bare knuckles scrape and flay was enough to unleash the pent-up frustration that agglomerated like the tower of Babel. A caged eaglet with broken wings, fueled by rage as he forges ahead each single day. The flickering fire became an embodiment of himself, the immeasurable scalding blue taking over his fundamental hue.


End file.
